THIS week, forecasts for the increase in household energy bills were dramatically increased to over £4,200 for an average UK household in January next year, with predictions it will reach over £5,000 during the year.
Almost every week the forecast for the increases, as the regulator Ofgem increases the price cap on energy, has soared.
Ofgem has reduced the time between price cap increases to three months instead of six months.
Now every three months workers and their families will be hit with price increases that they already can’t afford, as Ofgem and the Tories make sure that the working class pays for this crisis and the profits of the energy companies are protected at all costs.
Already millions of low paid workers, the unemployed and pensioners are going without food and are scared to turn on the gas and electricity. They are also forced to rely on food banks, that are running out of supplies, to survive. Starvation and freezing to death are the future for workers under capitalism.
Even the ultra-loyal Tory-supporting Telegraph paper has been driven to despair over the inability of the Tories to find a way out of the ‘economic tsunami’ hurtling towards the UK and the fact that: ‘Our absentee Cabinet can’t solve the energy crisis with another blast of hot air’.
The Telegraph points out that while UK households ‘owe £1.3 billion’ to energy companies, and over 6 million are more than £200 in debt, the entire Tory government is missing, in a state of collapse.
Labour leader Keir Starmer is also absent with ex-Labour Chancellor and Prime Minister Gordon Brown stepping into the breach.
In The Guardian newspaper, Brown outlined his solution to the crisis. He is urging the Tories to temporarily renationalise energy companies that fail to cut bills for their customers this winter.
Along with this, Brown called on the Tories to offer guaranteed loans and financing to energy companies so they could keep prices down.
Brown’s plan is simply for the part nationalisation of energy companies, taking over their debts from workers who can’t pay and returning them to the owners and shareholders once the crisis has passed – with the working class bearing the cost of bailing them out and paying for them to keep prices down.
But this crisis is not going to pass away as Brown hopes. It will only increase as the country and the world crashes further into recession and hyper inflation.
While the Tories are in a state of collapse, all Brown has come up with is a strategy to bail out the energy companies and, like the Tories, make the working class pay the bosses debts before handing the companies back.
While the Tories and Labour have no solutions except to force workers to bear the burden of the crisis, the working class is taking mass action with national strikes on the rail and Underground network being joined by CWU members in the telecoms industry along with postal workers poised to take similar action, while nurses and NHS workers are balloting over pay and conditions.
These are just the official balloted strike actions.
In an unprecedented escalation of the struggle workers are staging walk-outs in a wave of ‘wildcat’ strikes.
At the chemical giant INEOS’s Grangemouth site hundreds of contractors walked out on unofficial action, while similar wildcat strikes took place at the Humber and Valero refineries with more strikes planned in the coming days.
Non-unionised Amazon warehouse workers walked out last week over pay.
The working class is not prepared to see its lives and the lives of its families destroyed by a bankrupt capitalist system that is in its death agony and is showing that unlike the trade union leaders it is not intimidated by Tory anti-union laws and is prepared to take on the ruling class and the capitalist state.
This crisis demands a new leadership in the unions and throughout the working class to replace those leaders who are prostrate before the bosses and anti-union laws, a leadership prepared to organise a political general strike to kick out the Tories and bring in a workers’ government and socialism.
Only the WRP and YS fight for this programme – join today to build up the revolutionary leadership required to put an end to capitalism for good with a socialist revolution.
