TORY Prime Minister, Liz Truss, unveiled her package of measures to deal with the cost-of-living crisis yesterday. Her ‘bold’ new plan was nothing more than the widely trailed pledge to cap energy bills for the average household at around £2,500-a-year for the next two years.
While Truss was claiming that this would save the average household about £1,000-a-year, the stark fact for workers is this means they will still be paying 64% more on their energy bills than at the same time last winter.
Peter Smith from National Energy Action (a charity working to end fuel poverty) told the BBC that millions of households would still be left with bills at ‘unimaginable levels’.
As for schools, hospitals and all the other public sector services, which are not covered by any energy price cap and face gas and oil bills reaching gigantic levels, Truss vaguely promised a 6-month scheme of ‘equivalent support’ but offered no details.
Truss was clearly reluctant to put a price on all the measures contained in her proposals although the Treasury has already admitted it would cost at least £100 billion, with other estimates putting the figure at over £140 billion.
This money would be used to subsidise the energy companies and their giant corporate owners like the giant Centrica (who own British Gas) for any loss of profit due to capping energy bills at £2,500.
This is not the only support Truss is offering to energy companies that have made huge profits of over £170 billion over and above expected profits as a result of the massive increase in oil and gas prices on the international market.
Truss slipped into her speech that the Tories ‘will set up a new scheme worth up to £40 billion to ensure that firms operating in wholesale energy markets have the liquidity they need to manage price volatility.’
An extra £40 billion to bail-out energy companies if they get into trouble on top of the £140 billion to keep their profits up, and all this to be paid for by taking on even more debt to add to the massive £2.4 trillion national debt. All this debt will have to be paid for by the working class.
Normally, a new PM can expect a ‘bounce’ in the currency as the international money markets anticipate an end to chaos and new opportunities to make money.
In the case of Truss, this bounce lasted just a few hours before the pound collapsed, falling to its lowest level since 1985, a 37-year low, as the money markets braced themselves for Truss’s package and fears that funding it through debt would drive up inflation at a time when the economy was collapsing into recession.
The collapse of the pound means even more increases in prices for food and imported goods and massively increasing the cost of oil, which is priced in dollars, driving energy costs even higher.
The world’s bankers are now openly talking of British capitalism being like an ‘emerging market country’ – drowning in debt, wracked by political instability and facing a powerful working class that is rising up, refusing to being driven back to the ‘Hungry Thirties’ in order to keep this dying capitalist system on life-support.
All the Labour leader Keir Starmer could do, was to support and congratulate Truss for her ‘price cap’, while moaning that she should bring in a windfall tax on the energy companies. Starmer also went out of his way to offer full support to Truss and her fervent advocacy for war against Russia.
Starmer supports the Tories and imperialist war, but millions of workers are demanding action and taking up the demand for the TUC to call a general strike to kick out the Tories.
Next Monday, the TUC is meeting in Brighton, and now is the time for workers and youth to join the mass lobby called by the All Trades Unions Alliance to demand an immediate general strike to boot out the Truss government and go forward to a workers’ government and a socialist planned economy.
There is no a moment to lose!
