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Editorial: What shape should the blossoming rage at the energy price rises take?

FORMER Labour premier and chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown has dressed his warning — that families will suffer more in the coming months than during the financial crash of 2008 — as the preamble for a proposal that the energy companies might be taken into public ownership.

His cunning plan is to temporarily nationalise the energy corporations if they fail to cut fuel bill this winter.

As ever with the later Brown the motor of his thinking is his desire to stabilise the existing capitalist ownership system and safeguard the role of the City of London.

In 2008 his priority was to save the banks from themselves, prop them up with public money before shepherding them back into their allotted role in the ruinous financialisation of the British economy

Where he is right today is in insisting that the autumn energy price rises be cancelled and that Britain’s woefully insufficient energy storage infrastructure be boosted.

Bizarrely, but consistent with his mollycoddling of corporate profits, the ex-chancellor said the Tory government should offer guaranteed loans and equity financing to energy companies so they could keep their prices down.

It is hard to see why further public money should be funnelled to corporations which are already making mind-blowing profits.

The notion that once taken into public ownership the energy companies should be returned to the ownership of precisely the people who have price-gouged a desperate nation seems counterintuitive.

Once a leftwinger whose criticism of the lopsided Scottish economy seemed to anticipate common ownership as the solution to economic degeneration Brown — in a decade as chancellor and three years as prime minister — made government even more an appendage of the City and an autonomous Bank of England and more liable to the “boom and bust cycle” that he claimed to have eliminated.

In the New labour duopoly, he became even more wedded to an Atlanticist policy, projecting US policy into the EU and backing Blair’s wars.

It is precisely the liberalised system of financial markets and economic globalisation wedded to imperial war that Brown promoted that provides the political and diplomatic context for this energy crisis.

The point here is not to regret Brown’s abandonment of progressive government or traduce his period in office but to understand that economic policies based on taxing runaway speculative financialisation is not a sustainable basis for government in the circumstances in which we now exist. The 2008 financial collapse was more than a warning — it was a prediction of things to come.

This energy price crisis presents problems for the working-class movement that require us to transcend the limitations imposed by the stasis in parliamentary politics, go beyond the feeble proposals of a lackadaisical leader of the opposition and rely more on the creative energy of the working people in our three nations.

This is already evident in the stunning ballot results for industrial action and the immense public support for such action when it actually takes place. Working people know that every action in defence of living standards is in their interest also.

This proud shift in understanding not only confounds ministers and media barons but makes Labour's present leadership appear irrelevant to the reality in which millions of working people live and work.

Rage at energy prices rises which are simply impossible to pay will result in mass action of one kind or another.

Better it be led by individuals and organisations that have an intimate connection with working people and the organisational depth to make action continuous and effective than to leave it to chance. To spontaneous initiative must be added principled leadership.

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