International – A22 Network
Sweden – Återställ Våtmarker
USA – Declare Emergency
Germany – Letzte Generation (Don), (Son)
Canada – Save Old Growth (Tue/Thu), (Sat), (Sun)
Switzerland – Renovate Switzerland
Norway – Stopp Oljeletinga!
Italy – Ultima Generazione
France – Dernière Rénovation
Australia – Stop Fossil Fuel Subsides
17 August 2022, 12.01am
Republished from OpenDemocracy under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
When 62% of Conservative voters want energy run in the public sector, it’s fair to say the left has won the argument (75% of Labour voters agree, 68% of Lib Dems).
Yet public ownership is opposed passionately by the Conservative government, while the leader of the opposition has said he is “not in favour” of it – despite his election on a platform that committed to “bring rail, mail, water and energy into public ownership to end the great privatisation rip-off and save you money on your fares and bills”.
Public ownership is on the media’s radar, too. When Labour leader Keir Starmer announced his policy to freeze bills this week, he was asked why he wouldn’t also nationalise energy, replying that: “In a national emergency where people are struggling to pay their bills … the right choice is for every single penny to go to reducing those bills.”
But so long as energy remains privatised, every single penny won’t. Billions of pennies will keep going to shareholders instead.
The energy market was fractured under the mass privatisations of the Thatcher governments in the 1980s. It contains three sectors: producers or suppliers (those that produce energy), retailers (those that sell you energy), and distribution or transmission (the infrastructure that transports energy to your home).
It is important to bear this in mind when we’re talking about taking energy into public ownership. We need to be clear about what we want in public ownership and why.
By 2019, Labour had a detailed plan on how to do this – worked up by the teams around then shadow business and energy secretary Rebecca Long Bailey and then shadow chancellor John McDonnell. The plan is not the only way, but it illustrates what exists and how one could go about re-establishing a public energy ecosystem, run for people not profit.
The recent TUC report shows the cost of nationalising the ‘Big 5’ energy retailers – British Gas, E.ON, EDF, Scottish Power and Ovo – to be £2.8bn, which would go on buying all the companies’ shares. That’s a lot of money, equivalent to more than the annual budget of the Sure Start programme in 2009/10 (its peak year). But it’s a one-off cost, not an annual one.
And it’s not like the current privatised system doesn’t have its costs: since June 2021, the UK government has spent £2.7bn bailing out 28 energy companies that collapsed because they put short-term profits ahead of long-term stability – companies like Bulb Energy. We have spent billions of pounds already to get nothing in return. So £2.8bn is not a large amount of money to pay to gain these assets, rather than just bailing them out.
The big energy retail companies made £23bn in dividends between 2010 and 2020 according to Common Wealth, and £43bn if you include share buy-backs. What you choose to do with that surplus in public ownership is another matter: you could use it to invest in new clean energy or to lower bills or fund staff pay rises, rather than subject your workers to fire-and-rehire practices as British Gas did last year.
Labour’s previous plan also involved taking the distribution networks – the National Grid – into public ownership. This would end the profiteering at this level, too – with £13bn paid out in dividends over the five years prior to 2019. As Long Bailey said at the time, we need “public driven and coordinated action, without which we simply will not be able to tackle climate change”. Like previous nationalisations, the purchase of the grid and distribution networks could be achieved by swapping shares for government bonds. By international accounting standards, the cost is fiscally neutral as the state gains a revenue-generating asset, which more than pays for the bond yield.
The final part of the plan – and the most complicated – is production and supply. It would be impossible to nationalise the oilfields of Saudi Arabia or Qatar – and for good reasons we should want to leave fossil fuels in the ground, anyway, rather than contest their ownership.
And so what Labour proposed in 2019 was a mass investment in new renewable energy generation projects, with the public sector taking a stake and returning profits to the public. For example, under the ‘People’s Power Plan’, we proposed 37 new offshore wind farms with a 51% public stake, delivering 52GW alone by 2030, equivalent to 38 coal power stations. There were additional proposals for onshore wind, solar, and tidal schemes, as part of a 10-year £250bn Green Transformation Fund, which included other schemes like the Warm Homes insulation initiative.
Labour’s new shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has promised a similar level of investment – a £28bn a year climate investment pledge.
Any surplus energy would then be sold on international markets, with a People’s Power Fund – a sort of sovereign wealth fund – to deliver public investment in local communities’ social infrastructure: a genuine levelling-up fund, perhaps.
Many people will say this can’t be done, but of course it has been before. The 1945 Attlee government nationalised energy and successive Conservative governments – including those of Churchill, MacMillan and Heath – were happy to have a nationalised asset. Harold MacMillan famously accused Margaret Thatcher of “selling off the family silver” when she privatised state industries.
When I was born in 1979, the National Coal Board, British Gas and British Petroleum were all publicly-owned or majority publicly-owned companies. Between them, they were the major suppliers of our energy. Our gas bills came from British Gas and our electricity bills from our regional electricity board (in my case Seeboard, the South Eastern Electricity Board), and coal and oil fuelled our power stations.
The regional electricity boards had been brought into being by the Attlee government’s Electricity Act 1947, when electricity companies were forcibly merged into regional area boards and nationalised. The Coal Industry Nationalisation Act 1946 and the Gas Act 1948 had together brought energy into public ownership.
Seeboard was privatised in 1990, and later became part of EDF Energy – ironically, the nationalised French energy company, whose profits from the UK’s stupidity are used to subsidise French consumers.
The French government has now fully nationalised EDF (previously it was 84% publicly owned), and household energy bills rose by just 4% this year – compared to over 50% in the UK and a forecast 200% by January 2023.
If Starmer doesn’t want to listen to me (or his own commitments from 2020), perhaps emulating the centrist Emmanuel Macron in this instance would be palatable?
In his later years, Robin Cook argued: “The market is incapable of respecting a common resource such as the environment, which provides no price signal to express the cost of its erosion nor to warn of the long-term dangers of its destruction.”
From the depletion of fish stocks to the burning of the Amazon, profit has proved a failed regulator for use of our natural resources. The market has also failed to decarbonise at pace, or to end the scourge of fuel poverty.
On the media this week, shadow energy secretary Ed Miliband said Labour is “continuing to look at what the right long-term solution is for our energy system”. It is up to all of us to campaign for that solution to be public ownership – whether that’s from within the Labour Party (like me) or from the outside.
Republished from OpenDemocracy under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
Related at OpenDemocracy
Revealed: UK household energy debt hit record high even before price hikes
Revealed: Energy crisis has made 30 House of Lords members wealthier
On energy strategy, the government is leaving women in the cold
FIRST Minister Nicola Sturgeon has been urged to intervene to stop “over the top” policing of climate protests at COP26.
Environmental campaigners have claimed that there have been “numerous incidents” of abuse of power tactics by officers from forces all over the UK.
Around 10,000 officers a day have been deployed on the streets of Glasgow for the duration of the summit.
Activists have sent an open letter to the First Minister asking her to intervene to ensure the right to protest is upheld ahead of a mass climate march on Saturday, expected to draw in thousands and spark other protests across the country.
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Cop26 protest demands end to the hostile environment and the arms trade
A MARCH for peace travelled through Glasgow during Cop26 today, demanding an end to the hostile environment and the arms trade.
The demonstration, led by activists from Extinction Rebellion (XR) and XR Peace, travelled from the Home Office to BAE Systems to highlight the links between the climate crisis, Britain’s racist immigration policies and the arms trade — and in solidarity with climate and war refugees.
The event featured speakers from the Faslane Peace Camp, CND, and participants from the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp.
XR said that Britain’s military-industrial sector annually emits more greenhouse gases than 60 individual countries — such as Uganda, which has a population of 45 million people — while poorer countries suffer a huge injustice in climate and conflict.
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COP26 officials on Thursday are heralding developments they say signal that “the end of coal is in sight”—but advocates for strong climate action suggest holding the applause.
“Agreed at COP26 is an inadequate agreement that allows coal to continue for nearly 20 more years,” tweeted Extinction Rebellion. “But that’s excluding major nations who refuse to sign at all.”
Among the key developments at the ongoing climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland is the new Global Coal to Clean Power Transition Statement signed by nearly four dozen countries, though notably not the U.S., China, or Australia——among the world’s top coal producers.
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The UK Government has failed to lead COP26 talks on energy because it does not practice what it preaches, the Scottish Greens have said.
Today’s announcements on energy include a coal commitment that excludes the biggest polluters like the US, Australia, China and India and overseas finance plans that won’t cover projects already in the pipeline, like the UK’s planned investment in a gasfield in Mozambique.
Commenting, Scottish Greens climate spokesperson Mark Ruskell said: “Today marks a colossal failure of leadership by the UK Government, just days after the Prime Minister flew from Glasgow to London on a private jet.
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Ed Miliband Says Ministers’ “Flirting” With New Coal Mine Project Is Undermining COP26 Progress
Ed Miliband, the shadow energy secretary, has accused the government of “double speak and double standards” after they announced a series of commitments at COP26 to reduce the use of coal despite “flirting” with a new UK-based colliery.
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Speaking to PoliticsHome, Miliband said the refusal to scrap the project was “undermining” their ability to press other countries to take tougher acion on phasing out the use of coal.
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by Ian Dunt
Privacy campaigners are frantically trying to brief MPs about the implications of the data retention and investigatory powers bill (Drip), before it is forced through all of its Commons stages tomorrow.
The more experts look at the bill, the more convinced they’ve become that it provides authorities with the spine of the snoopers’ charter, but without any of the public debate or parliamentary scrutiny which were supposed to accompany it.
The charter – known as the draft communications bill before it was killed off – would have forced internet service providers and mobile operators to keep details of their customers’ behaviour for 12 months.
Analysis of Drip, which was supposed to only extend the government’s current powers for another two years, suggests it forces through many of those requirements on internet firms without any of the political outrage which derailed the earlier effort.
Clause four of the bill appears to extend Ripa – the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (basically Britain’s Patriot Act) – so that the UK government can impose severe penalties on companies overseas that refuse to comply with interception warrants. It also lays out situations in which they may be required to maintain permanent interception capacity.
Clause five then provides a new definition of “telecommunications service”, which includes companies offering internet-based services. That seems to drag services like Gmail and Hotmail into the law, and very probably social media sites like Facebook too.
The government insists the extraterritoriality clause merely makes explicit what was previously implicit. It’s tosh. As the explanatory notes for the legislation – released very quietly on Friday night – make clear, overseas telecommunications companies did not believe they were necessarily under Ripa’s jurisdiction.
“Regarding the amendments to Ripa, in view of the suggestion by overseas telecommunications service providers that the extra-territorial effect of Ripa is unclear, it is considered necessary to amend the legislation to put the issue beyond doubt,” it reads.
“This includes clarifying the definition of a ‘telecommunications service’ to ensure the full range of telecommunications services available to customers in the United Kingdom are included in the definition.”
David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband insist Drip merely extends their current powers for two years. That’s nonsense. These two clauses, which have nothing to do with the purported aim of the bill, provide the spine of the snoopers’ charter.
They also appear to provide a legal basis for programmes like Tempora, the project revealed by Edward Snowden to allow GCHQ to tap into transatlantic fibre-optic cables and stored data.
Notably, Privacy International, Liberty and others are taking the government to a tribunal this week on whether Tempora is legal, even though the government won’t even admit its existence. Drip could make the tribunal ruling irrelevant.
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Commentary and analysis of recent UK political events …
Good to see that blind old cnut David ‘airy-fairy civil liberties’ Blunkett announces his resignation at the next general election. Not a moment to soon, eh?
The Liberal-Demonrats are out for Nick Clegg while the Labour Party are out for Ed Miliband.
Nick Clegg is described as ‘toxic’ on the doorstep which seems about right. He is a very hated figure having abandoned election pledges and supported nasty Tories. The truth is that Nick Clegg has always been a Tory – he was a member of Cambridge Uniersity’s Conservative Association, worked in Leon Brittan’s private office in Brussels (after Leon was relocated by Thatcher under some very nasty – scandalous even – er, alleged circumstances) and is an out-and-out Tory according to the Orange book and his calls to privatise the NHS.
I’m disappointed that the Labour Party is pursuing a policy of continuing the Conservative-Liberal-Democrat (Conservative) coalition’s austerity measures instead of pursuing tax evasion and avoidance. I am disappointed, for example, that Rachel Reeves has stated that Labour intends to be harder on benefits claimants than the Tories and that she has recently announced benefits cuts on young people – exactly the opposite to previous claims.
Ed Miliband seems to be adopting a policy of doing nothing to differentiate himself and the Labour Party from the Tories or Liberal-Demonrats Tories in an attempt to preserve his narrow poll margin. He most certainly won’t have my support while he is trying to out-Tory the Tories.
Tens of thousands of people marched through central London on Saturday afternoon in protest at austerity measures introduced by the coalition government. The demonstrators gathered before the Houses of Parliament, where they were addressed by speakers, including comedians Russell Brand and Mark Steel.
An estimated 50,000 people marched from the BBC’s New Broadcasting House in central London to Westminster.
“The people of this building [the House of Commons] generally speaking do not represent us, they represent their friends in big business. It’s time for us to take back our power,” said Brand.
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* Plans for this blog include regular updates and ‘monetizing’ (making money from it). I have resisted this but I can’t really see any alternatives. I’m sorry to say that ads are on their way.
The dominance of a private-school educated elite and well-heeled middle class in the “upper echelons” of public life in Britain is “truly shocking”, Sir John Major has said.
The former Conservative Prime Minister said he was appalled that “every single sphere of British influence” in society is dominated by men and women who went to private school or who are from the “affluent middle class”
More than half of the Cabinet, including David Cameron, the Prime Minister, George Osborne, the Chancellor, and Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, are thought to have gone to private school [Isn’t that a fact? what’s this “though to have”? Isn’t it closer to all than half?] and are independently very wealthy.
In the speech to Tory party grassroots activists on Friday evening, Sir John – who went to a comprehensive in south London and left school with three O-Levels – said: “In every single sphere of British influence, the upper echelons of power in 2013 are held overwhelmingly by the privately educated or the affluent middle class. To me from my background, I find that truly shocking.”
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Well worth reading and I will adopt and adapt some of his suggestions.
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/10/russell-brand-on-revolution
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Cameron, Osborne, Boris, all of them lot, they went to the same schools and the same universities that have the same decor as the old buildings from which they now govern us. It’s not that they’re malevolent; it’s just that they’re irrelevant. Relics of an old notion, like Old Spice: it’s fine that it exists but no one should actually use it.
We are still led by blithering chimps, in razor-sharp suits, with razor-sharp lines, pimped and crimped by spin doctors and speech-writers. Well-groomed ape-men, superficially altered by post-Clintonian trends.
We are mammals on a planet, who now face a struggle for survival if our species is to avoid expiry. We can’t be led by people who have never struggled, who are a dusty oak-brown echo of a system dreamed up by Whigs and old Dutch racists.
We now must live in reality, inner and outer. Consciousness itself must change. My optimism comes entirely from the knowledge that this total social shift is actually the shared responsibility of six billion individuals who ultimately have the same interests. Self-preservation and the survival of the planet. This is a better idea than the sustenance of an elite. The Indian teacher Yogananda said: “It doesn’t matter if a cave has been in darkness for 10,000 years or half an hour, once you light a match it is illuminated.” Like a tanker way off course due to an imperceptible navigational error at the offset we need only alter our inner longitude.
Capitalism is not real; it is an idea. America is not real; it is an idea that someone had ages ago. Britain, Christianity, Islam, karate, Wednesdays are all just ideas that we choose to believe in and very nice ideas they are, too, when they serve a purpose. These concepts, though, cannot be served to the detriment of actual reality.
The reality is we have a spherical ecosystem, suspended in, as far as we know, infinite space upon which there are billions of carbon-based life forms, of which we presume ourselves to be the most important, and a limited amount of resources.
The only systems we can afford to employ are those that rationally serve the planet first, then all humanity. Not out of some woolly, bullshit tree-hugging piffle but because we live on it, currently without alternatives. This is why I believe we need a unifying and in – clusive spiritual ideology: atheism and materialism atomise us and anchor us to one frequency of consciousness and inhibit necessary co-operation.
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[7.30pm edit: I don’t want anyone thinking that I intend to be some political or spiritual leader. There were suggestions of this in the Jerusalem Post articles of 7 & 8th July 2005 which were the script to be followed in the July 7 bombings and investigation.
Brand acknowledges the role of materialism and self-interest in his article. From a personal perspective, many years ago I had a young man and a young woman presenting themselves to be used and I have the different odd nod of acknowledgment [1/11/13 and respect which is appreciated] every now and again. Apart from that it’s been a real pain and nothing but a real pain. Granted while I am occasionally successful in my endeavours, I don’t personally benefit from it and it does take some effort. ]
Ed impressed me at his conference. Looks like he’s two-faced in the tradition of Labour party leaders: They tell you what you want to hear. Original with comments is at: http://www.leftfutures.org/2013/10/ed-miliband-shifts-leftwards-at-conference-but-rightwards-in-the-plp/.
The Opposition shadow cabinet plus attendees is now composed of 12 Blairites, 4 Brownites (who together make up a majority), plus 9 centrists, and 6 on the left or left-inclining. Ed Miliband has constantly asserted that he wants a united party which balances the various factions and interests. In no sense can this reshuffle be said to achieve this. Leaving aside the centrists whose politics cannot readily be identified, the right outnumbers the left by almost 3 to 1. That is contrary to Ed’s instincts proclaimed at conference, contrary to the balance within the Labour Party as a whole, and contrary to the spirit of a shared unity which Ed professes to believe in.
One wonders who actually made the selections. What role was played by Ed’s office which is almost unanimously Blairite or right-wing? Who decided to drop Diane Abbott, a candidate for the leadership in 2010 and one of the small minority on the left who remained in the shadow cabinet?
Who decided to remove Lisa Nandy, one of the very few on the left in the 2010 intake and perhaps the most prominent, from her shadow responsibility for child care policies at which she was performing so well? Who decided to drop or move such prominent campaigners as Chris Williamson and Jack Dromey, and why?
Of course it is true that Miliband demoted three prominent Blairites, but they were replaced by persons of similar ilk. It is also true that the reshuffle in the junior ranks overwhelmingly favoured the Blairite faction whilst not one of the 2010 left intake was singled out for the front bench. This whole picture leaves a puzzling impression, that Ed Miliband’s political instincts are quite radical, yet in the PLP he errs towards placating the dominant faction, even though that makes it difficult if not impossible to achieve his political ambitions. It is hard to understand how he thinks he can achieve his vision when he suppresses or marginalises the very people who can create the political space for him and who would support him when times get tough, as in politics sooner or later they always do.
Labour will be tougher than Tories on benefits, promises new welfare chief
Labour will be tougher than the Tories when it comes to slashing the benefits bill, Rachel Reeves, the new shadow work and pensions secretary, has insisted in her first interview since winning promotion in Ed Miliband’s frontbench reshuffle.
The 34-year-old Reeves, who is seen by many as a possible future party leader, said that under Labour the long-term unemployed would not be able to “linger on benefits” for long periods but would have to take up a guaranteed job offer or lose their state support.
Adopting a firm party line on welfare, the former Bank of England economist stressed that a key part of her task would be to explode the “myth” that Labour is soft on benefit costs, and to prove instead that it will be both tough and fair.
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The Daily Mail has been almost universally condemned for attacking Ed Miliband through attacking his long-dead father. Ralph Miliband was a Marxist academic and activist, a Jewish immigrant to evade the Nazis and served in the British Royal Navy during the Second World War. He was accused by the Daily Mail of hating Britain when he actually hated many aspects of bigoted right-wing ideology in Britain.
There are similarities between the Daily Mail and this blog. We both have a huge online readership and influence and we both attack politicians. The Daily Mail is traditionally more open to conspiracy theories which I find refreshing.
The differences are ideological and that I often attack people who have already attacked me e.g. Tony Blair, David Blunkett and all the has-been old New Labour Home Secretaries and of course Ian Blair. My attacks on family members have probably only extended to Cherry and she was very closely associated with Tonee. I could very easily hint at obvious, acknowledged issues about the Blair ‘family’ as I’m doing right now. I very occasionally get the wrong target but I do apologise for it.
A comment made it through the spam filter today. It was spam. Please feel free to comment – it’s likely to be published so long as it’s not spam.
Labour Party leader made a well-received speech at their conference at Manchester yesterday.
“They think they are born to rule.” … “Have you ever seen a more incompetent, hopeless, out of touch, U-turning, pledge-breaking, make-it-up-as-you-go-along, back-of-the-envelope, miserable shower?” Miliband is here referring to class and/or private education (known in the UK by the misnomer ‘public school’) which is recognised to be much the same thing i.e. to be privately educated is to be ruling class and to be ruling class is to be privately educated[*1]. Private schools teach being ruling class, how to succeed in life by being a ***t [take your pick ;), to lie and cheat and to have an unflinching belief in your own innate superiority and righteousness.
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt makes loads of money for nothing and has charged the public purse for Mandarin lessons. How do Mandarin lessons benefit his constituents or the public? Talk about benefit scroungers …
One of the most powerful sections of Ed Miliband’s speech came when, with remarkable fluency, he declared of the government: “Have you ever seen a more incompetent, hopeless, out of touch, U-turning, pledge breaking, make it up as you go along, back-of-the-envelope, miserable shower?” Less than a day later, ministers have demonstrated exactly what he meant.
The Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin has announced that the decision to award the West Coast Main Line rail franchise to FirstGroup has been cancelled after the discovery of “significant technical flaws” in the bidding process. The government will no longer challenge the judicial review sought by Virgin, the current operator, which has long argued that the process did not adequately assess the risks of competing bids (it warned that FirstGroup’s £5.5bn bid was a recipe for bankruptcy). According to McLoughlin, the reopening of the bids will cost the taxpayer “in the region of £40m”.
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Planting GM crops has led to an increase rather than a decrease in the use of pesticides in the last 16 years, according to US scientists.
The researchers said that the plants have caused superweeds and toxin-resistant insects to emerge, meaning farmers have not only had to use more pesticides on their crops overall, but are also using older and more dangerous chemicals.
The findings dramatically undermine the case for adopting the crops, which were sold to farmers and shoppers on the basis that they would reduce the need to be treated with powerful chemicals.
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*1. This is not exclusively so. Ed Miliband attended Oxford University after his state schooling and was born to intellectual pretend-Socialist parents. While he missed out on public school, he did have the rest of the ruling class treatment. Does it make him semi ruling class or something similar? Notably, Miliband – just like his brother David – studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford. Virtually all UK prime ministers follow this course. Isn’t it strange that two brothers follow the same University course? Is there something [not] going on?
