The recent 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens reminded me that many of his characters, drawn from life, had a great struggle to keep warm with miserly bosses and an economic structure designed to benefit the few. This thought rang some bells. The recent modest and overdue fuel price reductions will have an equally modest effect on ordinary people struggling to raise families and pay mortgages and the millions who are already in fuel poverty. And there has been talk recently that the coldish snap may mean prices going up again!
In my view, the fuel companies benefit from a so-called ‘market’ where the main competition is about getting away with new charges and inflated prices, making more profits, taking bigger bonuses and treating people as monetary cannon fodder They point to rising prices in wholesale ‘markets’. They choose the timing and extent of price changes to suit themselves. Like other notorious sections of business today, they operate in effect, quite legally, as an informal cartel. They set their prices and margins in the same way and take it in turns to hike prices according to what they think they can get away with. Whether its gas, electricity or petrol one thing is certain, unless there is action rather than talk they will get away with a lot more of our money and their profits will not suffer one bit as a result.
Still, at least we needn’t lose sleep at night worrying about their executives’ remuneration; they at least will be comfortable in success or failure. Even if pensioners can’t afford to keep a room warm and you can't afford to use your car at least the board will still have money to burn!
In my opinion there should certainly be windfall taxes on fuel, power (and other) profiteering – the only question should be about the extent. It is clearly wrong that companies should make fat and inflated profits while people struggle to make ends meet, faced with rapidly rising costs for other essentials such as food or even hanging on to their own homes.
Electricity generation is now dominated by six firms that can in turn dominate you and me. Industry ‘regulation’ in all quarters has been weak under successive governments and will remain so. The exhortation to ‘shop around’ is worth little over time, it is a nuisance to do and a third of switchers actually make themselves worse off. And do they think that elderly people who have built the country up should be spending their retirement ‘switching’ between fuel companies (and banks) to reduce the extent to which they are exposed to highway robbery?
In my view also it is no defence for these organisations to retort that they are operating globally. Who has paid to make their fat global profits possible in the first place? We have! We’ve already paid ‘global’ companies with the British jobs they have exported and the higher prices they extract from us for the same products sold in other countries. This has fattened their profits and we’re entitled to a return on that too!
Since privatisation, foreign owned firms with even less concern for people here, sell North Sea gas to themselves during the summer for storing it in Europe and reselling here at higher prices in the winter. Those companies who use (by whose consent?) the label ‘British’ should be made to act as if they were. Big business in general should not be a morality-free zone. They should think of those who have to eke out a small pension. They talk about their tough choices. How would they like to try the really tough choice between food and warmth?
Those who take big from society should also give back in comparable measure. Long gone are the days when some of those in near monopoly positions could be relied on to do this to some extent on their own account – or to be socially responsible in the first place. So they need now to be taught by national action about the national interest and the common good not to mention gaining an understanding the Dickensian world that they are helping to re-create.
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