Keeping the fires burning

The major energy suppliers are getting the very bad press they thoroughly deserve and are being shouted at by mid-level politicians, although Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne are merely ‘disappointed’ at the latest round of the year after year across the board unwarranted price hikes. Jacked up prices that are deliberately made to extract even more profit from ordinary consumers, much of the lucre avoiding tax and going overseas, and which make it impossible for many people to keep their heating on and the home fires burning.
But why on earth would Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne be ‘disappointed’? What other sort of behaviour did they expect from these captains of industry (captains in the sense of Costa Concordia that is) – kindness of heart and concern for the common good?
Perhaps the kind of ‘free market’ fundamentalist economics books that the PM and the Chancellor have evidently skimmed don’t choose to cover the subject of oligopoly – an ugly word to cover an ugly situation where an industry is dominated by a few large firms.
One step down from pure monopoly, oligopolies come very close to the rank exploitative behaviour of an untrammelled private monopolist by behaving as a cartel. A cartel is where a market is rigged either through profit sharing (very rare) or price fixing (very common, as we know to our cost).
There doesn’t need to be a written agreement – in fact this is one of the few anti-social corporate behaviours that are actually illegal. But who needs to write it down? It’s so simple and a nod is as good as a wink. It’s as plain as a pikestaff. They all ratchet up prices by similar percentages without justification and take it in turns to go first.
I’d love to know if GCHQ has been monitoring the phones of the chief executives or finance officers of fuel and power companies and if so why they’ve done nothing to protect people from this evident threat. And I wonder if these executives are members of the same clubs or play on the same golf courses. These appalling excuses for companies then have the nerve to write obsequious letters to consumers to ‘explain’ the price ‘changes’. Their lack of morality is as bad as the banks and they deserve to be held in the same public contempt.
All of this is obvious to anyone outside government and there’s something else that is obvious too but which is rarely mentioned – privatisation is a catastrophic flop, is against the public interest and should be put into reverse. I hope that some of the MPs who are shouting will have the courage to draw this obvious conclusion and press for public companies in the public interest. But I doubt that many will. Perhaps some of them are more angry at their re-election chances being ruined than at hard pressed consumers being ruined or passing away with hypothermia.
But there are signs at last that the opposition (and even some figures from within government parties) is finding its courage. Let’s hope this is a trend that gathers pace and brings initial positive results before the depths of winter. The power companies hope that the sound and fury will die down, but these are fires that also need to be kept burning.