To think it’s time for a general strike

[Mountainatmygates]

I am old enough to remember the poll tax riots which did eventually bring about a shift in policy.

The country is on its knees - I read yesterday that energy bills could hit 6k a year in the spring and put 45 million into fuel poverty.

it’s completely nuts and the current government are wholly to blame after 12 years in power. I have just been in France where bills have risen 4% because the energy companies are nationalised.

I think it’s genuinely time for some collective action.

I'm with you OP!

For the people saying "there won't be enough people that take part for it to work"... just wait and see what happens when your energy bill comes in at the end of October. Let's hope it's a reasonably mild month!

I dunno, I suppose none of that will really matter when half the population all die of starvation or hypothermia. Due to nothing else but companies' GREED.

What if the UK's purpose isn't to be attractive to investors but to focus on reducing the wealth inequalities? To focus on providing a good quality of life to the people who live here?
Thinking that a country's only purpose is to attract large-scale foreign investment is what has caused the vast income inequality in the first place.
The UK isn't a business. You can tell because it would be run by people who were qualified rather than the current shower. The Government is supposed to safeguard and invest in our resources not pawn the assets and run down the people.

The middle-class on here ought to spend a day volunteering in a food bank to see reality

Food banks locally are only open while I'm at work otherwise I'd love to help out.

Then their numbers are wrong. What bit of ‘British Gas’s market capitalisation alone is £5 Bn’ is hard to understand? That is double the £2.5 Bn estimate you have just given, which apparently would buy all the shares in all of the ‘energy companies’. Which conflicts with the £2.8 Bn estimate you linked to earlier, which was the purported cost to acquire the five largest U.K. energy vendors, including British Gas. And British Gas only one utility reseller, of many.

How will acquiring every energy vendor operating in the U.K. reduce the wholesale price of gas? That’s not within their control.

Yeah but inflation is a global phenomenon at the moment caused by global pressures. Why on earth do you think a general strike will do anything other than make things worse

If the Uk isn’t attractive to investors (domestic and foreign) the economy will get much much worse and we will all be poorer. Don’t know what you are suggesting re inequality but unfortunately there are not easy answers.

Don't need to nationalise the whole company, just as investment banking wasn't bailed out during the GFC, only the retail part.

Around 4% of of the total value of UK pension funds is in energy.

But the point you are not addressing is that unless radical ideas are considered, then the Govt will just carry on handing £100s of billions to consumers to prevent starvation and death, not too mention economic collapse.

Govt help so far, according to their figures is approx £40 billion and that is based on fuel cap of £2000 and is just for a few months.

what happens if/when price cap stays at £5k for the foreseeable future? No one is going to be trading with Russia for many years to come unless the Ukraine war stops and Putin is no longer in power, two very big uncertainties.

Yeah “nationalisation” of utilities at huge cost will do nothing whatsoever to bring down global energy prices.

Energy suppliers are making losses and going bust. That’s why so many don’t want to take on new customers. They have to buy energy on global market at a higher price than they are allowed to sell it for due to the price cap.

If the Uk isn’t attractive to investors (domestic and foreign) the economy will get much much worse and we will all be poorer. Don’t know what you are suggesting re inequality but unfortunately there are not easy answers

A lot of foreign investment is buy outs of UK PLC.

The economy is sunk unless people can afford to go out for the day and shop etc.

In the past, when folk were v poor, we had a very large manufacturing sector, thats gone, replaced with consumerism and services.

A 1% wealth tax on the UK 171 billionaires would raise almost 60 billion.... now thats simplistic but the point is, very small increases in tax on the extremely rich wont effect them but would have a huge positive impact on the rest of us.

If they already pay all this tax people say they do, how come they keep getting wealthier and wealthier?

Don't say "They'll leave" that has been totally debunked & and where too? most countries taxes are higher than the UK's.

They resigned from their jobs. That’s very different from stopping working and saying that you expect to have your job kept open for you.

Everyone should have the right to withdraw their labour. Every employer should have the right to find someone else to do the job instead if they do so.

There are huge swathes of employees that can't strike. I'm in the NHS. My union voted to 'strike' in 2014, for the first time in its >100 year history - what it meant in practice was that if you were rostered to work you still had to turn up for your regular shift (but we were encouraged to 'try and take your full breaks and leave on time' lol) and if you were on a day off or a sleep day having worked the previous night you could go to the picket lines instead. For many workers, not turning up to work has no impact on the government; it only harms the general public who are already on their knees. Our strike (if you can call it that, it was business as usual in the hospital) was almost totally ineffectual as a result. What can we do?

@MsPincher Read the thread, not talking about Octopus etc but the production companies.

A general strike won’t undo the damage done by lockdowns (unprint the £450b of money), it won’t add nuclear power stations into grid overnight, it won’t undo the damage done by welfare subsidized wages.

You are venting, but general strikes cannot undo the damage done by 25 years of bad policy.

OK, so what are you doing about it? It’s easy for you to post on here, but are you willing to actually go out and do the organising, make yourself the figurehead, find funding to pay the bills of those striking, draw up the manifestos and so on?

I suspect not, but if you are then this seems like a good place to let others know, and ask them to join you.

What and lose my job and not get paid? Nah, I’ll sit this one out thanks.

To be honest it doesn’t really no. I am not a bojo fan or Tory voter but I don’t think there’s any evidence that they caused the increase in energy prices. It’s a global phenomenon.

I've seen a general strike on the horizon for some time now.

Scratching my head a bit over the barristers rejecting 15%. The rest, I wholeheartedly support.

I’m sure that this sounded very good in your head but where is your evidence that posters on this thread don’t know what ‘reality’ is?

That not everybody is on board with the general strike idea, because it makes no logical sense, doesn’t mean that the same people can’t see the impact of high energy costs. They just don’t agree with your solution.

This is where you go, “yes, but what alternative are YOU suggesting?”.

And when they did that, you presumably looked at their actual market capitalisation, realised they were completely wrong, and let them know?

Or did you just believe them?

I'm absolutely behind it. Money is what the rich investors treasure over everything. Withdraw labour, no profits.
Nobody, whatever their job, should ever work for less than a living wage. Food and heat is not negotiable.

On the contrary. Mrs Pincher has read the thread correctly. The OP has linked to two separate articles speculating on the cost of nationalising the energy vendors, not the gas extractors. Two entirely separate groups.

I posted the market capitalisations of two oil and gas extraction businesses, BP (> £80 Bn) and Shell (> £160 Bn) upthread and asked (1) where the money to acquire the shares was coming from, (2) how the shareholders would be compelled to sell and (3) how nationalising those businesses would reduce the wholesale price of gas.

No answer. Another poster smartly asked how the government that the OP and others describe as incompetent could be expected to run these multi billion pound businesses. No reply to that either. Funny that.

This is just silliness. It’s like a student communist society debate (of the usual mc luvvies there to upset their wealthy parents).

As someone who has worked in development I can tell you that there are many countries in the world which are not attractive to investors (foreign and local). They are all desperately poor.

where do you get the “wealth tax” figures from? I thought we were talking about a general strike anyway?

Anyway striking because of inflation will not help- just make the economy even worse.