GRANT Shapps, the Tory secretary of state for energy security and net zero, yesterday unveiled the government’s latest strategy to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.
This was immediately denounced by environmentalists as being full of ‘half-baked, half-hearted’ policies that would have nil effect in achieving the reduction in greenhouse gases.
In fact, Shapps admitted when he introduced the document, that the main concern of the Tories is not reducing carbon emissions but pushing the cost of energy even further onto the working class.
Shapps said: ‘The measures today, about 1,000 pages of different measures, are all to do with our energy security because we have been hauled over the coals by Putin’s war in Ukraine. It has hit us hard, the government has ended up paying around half of the typical energy bill this winter.’
The Tories are not concerned with the future of the planet in the slightest. Instead, their greatest concern is the fact that the imperialist war against Russia and all the sanctions on Russian energy supplies have backfired.
They have revealed the reliance not just of Europe but the UK on cheap energy from Russia, with sanctions driving the cost of oil and gas through the roof.
In order to head off a revolt by the working class over energy bills reaching the stratosphere, the Tories were forced to introduce a price cap that Shapps is complaining has forced the Tories to pay billions of pounds to the energy companies in compensation.
Now, the Tories want to end subsidising the profits of the energy giants under the cloak of a ‘green’ agenda.
Instead, this latest strategy involves driving up the cost of gas in order to force people to use electricity as the main source of energy for heating their homes and driving cars, through a proposal to ban all new petrol and diesel cars from 2030.
The fact that the infrastructure would require a massive investment by the government to meet the demands of all electric vehicles is ignored by Shapps, in his zeal to cut government spending.
The Tories are proposing to drive up the price of gas central heating, the main source of heating in the country, forcing everyone to either freeze or retro-fit electric heat pumps in their homes.
Heat pumps cost over £20,000 to buy and fit, and require houses with gardens, lofts and enough land to make them viable. They are also considered to be unreliable in cold weather.
Not just the working class but overwhelming numbers of middle class people will be unable to afford the new luxury of heating their homes or driving a car.
This has caused a furious split within the Tories – an anger that came pouring out in yesterday’s Tory supporting Daily Telegraph, with an article headed ‘Net zero is a Trojan Horse for the total destruction of Western society’ with the strapline: ‘Prepare for a people’s revolution against policies that will abolish choice and impoverish millions.’
This section of the Tories, in revolt against Sunak and Shapps, have shown scant regard in the past for the millions of workers who have been impoverished through 13 years of Tory austerity cuts, but now that they are being joined by the great mass of the middle class, the alarm bells are ringing.
The middle class has no independent role to play in the class struggle, historically it sides with the class it sees as the strongest, and today the overwhelming majority of the middle class see a Tory party that is split from top to bottom, trying to run a capitalist system that is disintegrating by the day, and with no way out but to dump its crisis on them.
Pitted against the Tories and the ruling class is a powerful, undefeated working class that is already taking mass action over pay and conditions, and is determined not to be impoverished to boost the profits of the bankers and bosses.
Now certainly is the time to prepare for revolution, a workers revolution to smash capitalism worldwide.
We must build up rapidly the WRP and Young Socialists to organise the British socialist revolution. We must build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International worldwide to smash capitalism, and replace completely bankrupt capitalism with the World Socialist Republic!
