Our energy system is rigged. It’s not a market, it’s a feeding ground for corporate profiteering and reckless price hikes. It simply does not work for ordinary people or the industries we rely on. It’s time to put public ownership of our energy back on the agenda.
I’m not calling for nationalisation because of dogma or ideology. It’s simple common sense that we need greater control of our energy sector.
This won’t be the first or last crisis we face – and unless we have the ability to shape our own energy security, we will be left vulnerable to the whims of the market and global forces.
Our recent Unite Investigates report shows that if domestic energy had been in public hands at the time the crisis hit, we could have saved every household £1,800 and cut inflation by over 4%.
Public ownership of energy would have done far more to curb the cost-of-living crisis than any interest rate hike by the Bank of England and cost workers and their families far less.
That is huge. So, when people talk about the cost of renationalisation, we need to put it into perspective.
Unite’s recent research paper on profiteering shows we could take the energy system back into public control for £90billion – the same price as just two years of the mega profits recently made by Big Energy. Meanwhile, once we own the industry, it’s on our books as an asset.
Nobody seriously thinks “we can’t afford it”.
In France, the government bought the remaining shares of EDF to take it into public ownership. At the same time, they froze gas prices and capped electricity prices at 4%. They could do this because they owned an energy giant.
In the UK, rather than challenge the system, we simply asked the taxpayer to subsidise private profits to help keep prices down. Robbing Peter to pay Paul. We took with one hand and gave with the other.
Who really believes that the windfall tax on energy firms will be policed properly and that the mega billions will really flow back into the exchequer?
A short-term fix for political optics is not what we needed.
When households are getting hammered by price hikes it’s disappointing to say the least that the Labour Party are lagging behind on this.
There has been a lot of talk about the Green Transition and mixed messages about investment, but one thing is clear – tinkering around the edges will get us absolutely nowhere.
We are already behind the curve, and the danger is if there is no clear plan for the transition we will end up with North Sea workers thrown on the scrapheap. We have been there before with the mining communities. That cannot happen again.
If our politicians are going to deal with security concerns at a time of rising global tensions then they are going to have to make decisions, not jump on bandwagons or commentate from afar. And the future of our energy supply is where that journey must begin.
Do we want to be in hock to the profiteers or stand on the side of households and businesses that rely on reasonable energy costs to keep the lights on?
