LABOUR’S proposal to stop any rise in the energy price cap this winter shows it is finally getting serious about the financial precipice facing millions of households.
After a succession of vacuous speeches making vague promises to “solve” the cost-of-living crisis, now we have detail. Sir Keir Starmer has even learned the language of us and them, pledging to fund his plan by raising the windfall tax on the “eye-watering profits” being posted by the fossil fuel industry.
This is a welcome shift from the Labour Party, and it has happened under pressure: the growing clamour for action to bring down bills expressed through a rising tide of protest, the determination workers and their unions are showing to demand better through a still mounting wave of strikes.
That does not mean it is a good policy. As Unite’s Sharon Graham points out, it is a temporary and piecemeal plan which doesn’t address the elephant in the room — ownership.
Bills would be frozen where they are — 54 per cent higher than they were before April — for six months.
Remember that French citizens, with their already largely state-owned energy firm EDF now being taken entirely under public control, have had rises limited to 4 per cent.
We are helping to pay for it. As the Unite leader notes, EDF is a major energy supplier in Britain. As on the railways, state ownership is fine — so long as it isn’t our state.
Labour does not propose higher corporation taxes in general to tackle the “epidemic of corporate profiteering” cited by Graham, which Unite’s research branch Unite Investigates detailed in a landmark report, Corporate Profiteering and the Cost-of-Living Crisis, published in June but still studiously ignored in mass media reportage.
It merely advocates closing a tax-break loophole, introduced by the Tories to encourage more fossil fuel extraction on British territory.
That’s the right thing to do, of course — the sweetener is short-termist and utterly irresponsible given the climate chaos we are seeing wreak havoc around the world this summer.
But that, and a backdating of the tax to raise a bit more, are sticking plasters applied to a chronic condition. There is no recognition in Labour’s plan of the reality stated explicitly by France’s right-wing Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne — that public ownership is the only way to guarantee energy security in an increasingly unstable world.
There are longer-term proposals for investment in renewables and a home insulation programme, but Starmer is as deaf to lessons from abroad as he is to the overwhelming public appetite for nationalisation.
With the International Atomic Energy Agency sounding the alarm over the risk of a nuclear catastrophe at Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine — occupied by the Russian army — because of artillery exchanges hitting the plant, champions of new nuclear (and Labour’s energy plan includes accelerating development of the sector) need to at least explain how it is to be kept safe in an international environment where war between great powers looks frighteningly plausible.
Starmer’s Labour is still tinkering at the edges: proposing no significant changes to an economic model which a growing majority understand is robbing us blind.
But it is moving. And that underlines the weakening of the right’s stranglehold on policy just as does the growing confidence of Labour MPs, including shadow cabinet members, to attend picket lines despite their boss’s orders not to.
The changes are too small to celebrate as any significant boost in influence for the Labour left. Rather they reflect real-world politics making itself heard in Westminster: the demands of unions and mass campaigns for action forcing a policy response.
And they shift the conversation onto what more can be done to help struggling households. The Tory candidates for the top job will be under pressure to do more.
Our task, then, is to keep that pressure on.
