Wednesday 22 August 2012

Utility

Gas and electricity bills to rise by nine per cent.

Even after that, the Energy Bill will send gas and electricity prices up by two hundred pounds per annum. Like our water, and like other essential services such as our railways, our energy is increasingly owned, not merely by foreign companies, but by foreign states. The Coalition wants the sovereign wealth funds of those flush with oil revenue to buy up our roads and to charge us tolls for using them.

Even Simon Heffer and Peter Hitchens are now calling for the National Grid for water that, like a Norwegian-style investment fund for North Sea Oil, would have happened if it had not been for the 1979 General Election. Heffer does not yet openly acknowledge, although Hitchens does, that the only way to such a Grid is public ownership. (Oh, and who earth could possibly want "more freedom to choose your water supplier"? I don't know about you, but my water supplier is the sky, which sends it down for free, and in no ungenerous quantities this year.)

But among politicians rather than commentators, so much for Tory patriotism. Including Tory realism in our dealings with foreign states. We need publicly owned coal mines and publicly owned nuclear power stations to provide publicly owned electricity that might be too cheap to need to be metered, and which would certainly power publicly owned trains free at the point of use and once again stretching to every corner of the Kingdom as the bone structure and the nervous system of our transport infrastructure; Hitchens declared on Sunday that he would support any party that promised to bring back British Rail. And we need a publicly owned water supply, likewise inexpensive to the consumer, and organised as a National Grid.

The endorsements of at least two leading Mail columnists await, one of them the man behind RightMinds and the other a very significant factor in his paper's domination of the Sunday middle market. Plus the endorsement of the Mail newspapers themselves, which Tony Blair never even so much as sought, just as under him Labour never even so much as contested wards where this year it took 60 per cent of the vote? If not, why not?

Ed Miliband, Jon Cruddas and Maurice Glasman over to you.

1 comment:

  1. The whole "freedom of choice" and "competition" arguments for private utilities make no sense. These are natural monopolies. Public ownership is the only way to go.

    We often have regulated private utilities in the U.S., but the utilities just lobby for lax regulation, which produces the high prices and awful service you would expect.

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