SCOTTISH Power has just reported a 95 per cent leap in its profits. It also warned its 5.2 million customers to prepare for a double digit rise in their gas and electricity bills, just four months after the last increase.
The power giant said that electricity and gas price rises would be necessary due to current high wholesale prices.
This announcement came after the company declared £329m in third quarter pre-tax profits, up from £168m a year earlier, and that its revenues for its third quarter to 31 December had increased to £1.6bn from £1.3bn a year previously.
Its last price increase was in October when the company said that it had been hit by a 70 per cent rise in wholesale energy costs over the previous six months.
Clearly Scottish Power is making use of the capitalist crisis to make huge profits, by fleecing its working class customers.
It is not alone. Earlier this week British Gas confirmed that it was going to raise its prices by another 25 per cent, after the 15 per cent rise of a couple of months ago, while the Shell and BP oil companies announced record multi-billion profits, at a time when petrol prices are at an all time record high.
BP reported a 25 per cent increase in annual profits and its profits for 2005 went up to £11.04bn, with profits for the last three months of the year increasing by 26 per cent.
Shell made profits of £13.12bn – up nearly a third on last year when oil prices leapt from $45 to $70 a barrel. All the banks have made record profits.
The capitalist crisis is meanwhile continuing to sharpen. Oil and gas prices are shooting through the roof, a process that is set to accelerate. The big capitalist monopolies are making billions, and plan to make even more, while the vast price increases inflicted on the workers are never reflected in the Labour government’s rigged inflation rate figures, which Chancellor Brown uses to keep wages down.
The trade unions have a responsibility to deal with this critical situation for their members and their families, who are rapidly being pauperised, by the crisis of capitalism, by giant price rises, cheap labour jobs and collapsing pensions etc.
The TUC must be made to draw up its own cost of living index, with an inflation rate figure based on the price increases of commodities that are working class necessities.
The trade unions must then battle with the employers and the government that wages automatically rise to keep pace with this real TUC inflation rate index, thus helping to maintain the real value of workers wages, to prevent pauperisation.
However, this policy to defend the value of wages will not resolve the sharpening crisis of capitalism.
For this political action is needed on a world scale.
British trade unions must play their part in organising this action. The best way to cut basic oil and gas prices is by forcing a British imperialist withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq, to end these attempts to grab the oil and gas resources of the Arabian peninsula and the Caspian Sea.
This will allow oil and gas bearing countries to make new and mutually beneficial arrangements concerning the sale of their resources to countries such as Britain.
At home the working class must take action against the bosses, their banks, and major monopolies, all determined to maximise profits and pauperise workers.
The oil and gas companies and the banks must be nationalised so that their vast revenues can be used for the benefit of the working class, for its wages, jobs and pensions, and not to further enrich billionaire and millionaire shareholders.
Crucial to this whole struggle is the development of the WRP into the real political and revolutionary leadership of the British workers, to lead the struggle for workers power and socialism.