TORY Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has issued the call for workers to go without heating this winter to support the imperialist war on Russia.
Appearing before MPs at a Treasury Committee meeting on Wednesday, Hunt used the opportunity to insist that people must ‘take responsibility’ for their energy bills and consider how to cut their consumption.
Taking responsibility according to Hunt means workers and the middle class embracing the Tory ‘national ambition’ of cutting energy use by 15%.
This would, he claimed, mean households would save £500 on their heating bills, but people ‘need to change their behaviour’ to achieve this goal.
Hunt plucked the figure out of thin air because it exactly matches the amount that an average household will have to find when he ends the energy price cap, currently £2,500, in April, sending the cost of energy up to the new price cap of £3,000-a-year.
Of course, this is just the figure for an average household. The actual cost of energy bills will be determined entirely on how much gas and electricity a household uses.
So, as Hunt cheerfully admits, the only way for households to try and keep up with the sky-high energy bills is to turn off the gas and electricity, turn off the heating during winter and stop using electricity to cook food.
People need to change their behaviour by accepting freezing while their children go without hot food, all for the good of the nation, in order, Hunt said, to stop the UK being ‘blackmailed’ by Russia.
He told the committee the working class should be grateful for going cold and hungry ‘because it is a national mission to make sure that we can’t be blackmailed by people like Putin when they do things that interrupt international energy supplies’.
In fact, the disruption to energy supplies was caused not by Russia but by the massive sanctions imposed by the US, Britain and EU on Russia.
Sanctions that the Tories assured everyone when they were introduced would be completely painless to Britain.
The US, UK and NATO are responsible for starting the war. It was they who organised and financed the fascist-led coup in Ukraine in 2014, to drive NATO forces to the very borders of Russia, with the intention of provoking a deliberate war to weaken Russia, leaving it open to capitalist domination.
Sanctions were designed to crush the Russian economy at absolutely no cost to the capitalist countries.
These sanctions have backfired spectacularly and now the Tories are desperate to lay the blame at the door of Russia.
While the Tories are demanding sacrifices from the workers at home in the form of eye-watering energy bills and a cost-of-living crisis forcing millions into absolute poverty, no such cuts are being made on financing the imperialist war effort.
Since February, the UK has committed £2.3 billion in military aid to Ukraine with Hunt pledging further billions to keep the war going, at a time when the working class at home are being hammered into the ground by inflation and recession.
Behind the war on Russia, the Tories are waging an even more decisive war against the working class at home. Workers are told that they should accept sacrifices for the war abroad and at the same time passively accept poverty level pay increases far below inflation, all for the greater good of the bosses and bankers.
The working class is not a passive class and is determinedly fighting against a bankrupt capitalist system and a Tory government that is on its last legs.
The massive strike action sweeping the country is testimony to the eagerness of millions of workers and young people to take on the bosses and the Tories.
The issue of the day is to demand that the leaders of the trade unions and TUC organise this mass movement into a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government and socialism.
A workers’ government will deal with the cost-of-living crisis by expropriating the bosses and bankers and end all support for the imperialist war on Russia.
This is the way forward. Join the WRP and the Young Socialists today in order to lead the British socialist revolution in the days ahead!
