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.

So how does this nationalisation reduce the cost of gas and electricity?

I’d have thought that was self evident. It removes the profit element, eliminates dividends to shareholders and means salaries of the people running the companies can be regulated. It’s becoming an increasingly attractive idea, particularly since the UK is an outlier, most countries’ utilities are publicly owned.

But most of the production companies are not British, so it’s not a sensible solution.

The answer is for people to use less gas and electricity. Families should consider sharing homes, people need to get used to heating their homes to lower temperatures, not heating every room, and of dressing differently.

Finding ways to allow everyone to keep burning fossil fuels, as the planet heats up, is not the right thing to do practically or morally.

Thanks @Iamthewombat of course you’re right- nationalizing energy suppliers or producers will not reduce global price of energy.

Energy suppliers already don’t make any profit or very little. We control the prices they can sell energy at already- it’s so low that many have already gone bust.

global prices of gas and oil are outwith our control.

A 1% wealth tax on the UK 171 billionaires would raise almost 60 billion.... now thats simplistic

Hello, is that Mr Abramovich? Can I call you Roman? Hi, we’d like you to give us £35 million please. No reason, just a wealth tax based on how rich we think you are. In cash, by the end of the month. Thanks, byeeee! Whilst you’re on the phone, do you have a mobile number for Mr Deripaska? Or Mr Blavatnik?

The French have nuclear power - at the last count the majority were v much against that - where would you store the waste etc

Yip - exactly. And even British production companies are extracting primarily outside the uk. A longer term energy strategy needs to move away from fossil fuels (this is happening to some degree) but it will take time.

Missed a zero. I meant £350 million! That’s all right, isn’t it? Ciao!

Isn't the nhs a nationalised company

But it wasn't really the demo's that brought about change - a massive contributory factors was the widescale rioting. Civil unrest and anarchy are far better at motivating governments and their powerful friends to take a different approach - at least in the short term. The Council Tax might have seemed like a climbdown, but it only partially redressed the major shift towards a much costlier local taxation system. Loss of control is what the ruling classes fear. Not general strikes or demonstrations. Even on the rare occasions when the latter may give pause for thought, the medium and long term outcomes are always that the workers lose.

BTW, whilst being a life-long trade unionist, and would support a general strike because that is what one does - there are no scabs in our family - I should perhaps point out that (a) the General Strike was a massive failure and (b) at least the TUC supported workers in 1921, but now you should expect both the TUC and the Labour Party (who were opposed to the General Strike) to fall into line with the government and shaft the workers. I also recall the Poll Tax demo's - and the Miners Strikes.

You said the retail part (which is the suppliers). As has been explained the producers are often not uk based, even if they are their production is elsewhere and nationalizing them will be very expensive but would be unlikely to reduce prices.

The NHS isn’t a company at all, no.

This

It's just run like on.
Badly.

If we look at one of the bigger names in supply, British Gas, they make around £10 per customer per year. Removing the profit element entirely would save, at most, £10 per year.

It there was any drop in efficiency by giving the role to the state, then it’d be less.

How do you think a likely £5 reduction in each household’s bill, per year, is going to make any appreciable difference?

Sadly @CanDo92 is correct. The obscene salaries and divis paid to those running energy companies bear no relation to profits arising from domestic energy use.

What has happened imv is that all manufacturing has gone to east Asia - partly our fault as who doesn't always want the cheapest - so all we do now is use Chinese goods or sell them. We don't make anything. Our workers presumably weren't the best and they also wanted to be well paid, though eg Nissan in the N E did well. So now we are workers who provide services to other workers and since the bank crash we don't have enough money coming into the U.K. to maintain htis system.
Most companies are foreign owned eg water cos.
To get out of it I spose we have to use less, work hard, invent, develop.

So where does the money come from to pay them?

We are around the tenth largest manufacturer on the planet;

www.brookings.edu/research/global-manufacturing-scorecard-how-the-us-compares-to-18-other-nations/

In the 70s, Heath had the Chairmen of Shell and BP in Downing St and pleaded with them to do something to try and reduce the cost of energy. Bearing in mind at this time the UK government, at least in terms of BP, owned a huge stake of the company, and it was not possible to do anything then, let alone now - the price of oil and gas cannot be set by a couple of companies, however big.

If in some mad student communist fantasy the Government wanted to "buy" Shell and BP (so with a spare 250 billion) they would simply de-list the shares in London and move to another country.

Production, and from industrial uses.

Fertiliser production is one of the largest global consumers of fossil fuels, for example.

None of the pie-in-the-sky ideas above is going to have any significant effect on your fuel bills this winter. The state is already providing significant help, and beyond that, individual actions are what will make the difference to your costs.

Moving into one room in your house, and heating only that. Sharing with extended family, dressing differently, and so on, this is the route to reducing your bills; not railing at global energy producers’ profits.

The state is in massive debt because of the costs of COVID. The war in Ukraine has removed one of Europe’s main sources of fossil fuel, and the needs to change fuel use for ameliorating climate change has ruled out returning to burning coal.

I wish that we’d ignored the greens, and properly invested in nuclear power, but sadly they are an influential lobby, and will need to bear their share of the blame for any deaths from hypothermia this winter.

We should have national days of protest, a day when the whole country protests against the government, it's policies, the rising cost of living, bring the country to a standstill.

Alexei Sayle’s response was
”Presumably because the last one was such a rip-roaring success”

@Nat6999 Go on then, if you think their is support for this then start trying to organise it? Or you could just tap out faux rage on MN?

Flapjacker48 hopefully the Enough is Enough campaign will lead to protests on a national scale & before you ask I have already signed up for it. Ds has been on the RMT picket in our city every day the strikes have been on & the CWU picket as a member of the Green Party. I'm disabled & housebound but am doing what I can, what are you doing?