Nationalise Energy now!

Iain Dalton, Socialist Party National Committee

As another week of volatility in world oil and gas prices ended, Asda chief executive Allan Leighton warned of the potential for fuel shortages at his company’s petrol stations.

Since Trump’s bombing of Iran began, petrol is up by an average of 17p per litre and diesel is up a whopping 35p.

Hapless Prime Minister Keir Starmer has threatened to ‘step in’ if fuel companies are “ripping people off”. Is he oblivious to the super-profits energy companies have been making over recent years, while ordinary people’s living standards suffer?

A Unite report published last October highlighted UK energy companies making £30 billion in profit in 2024 – that’s the equivalent of every household in the UK handing over £500 each to subsidise their profits!

By leaving those companies in private hands, Starmer is letting the super-rich energy bosses off the hook. And now Nigel Farage’s Reform has joined him. Reform has dropped its general election policy to nationalise the energy companies. Farage’s own Thatcherite inclinations have likely been reinforced by all the recent refugees from the Tories!

Starmer and Farage both defend capitalism – a system based on workers being ‘ripped off’ by employers who do not pay us the full value of our labour. Capitalism ‘works’ by extracting the biggest profits from the goods and services that ordinary workers in those sectors produce, including energy.

We can’t control what we don’t own – that’s why it’s mistaken for the Green Party, at its online conference on 28 March, to row back on its policy for nationalising the energy suppliers and retail.

Not only should every facet of the major energy companies be brought into public ownership, but it should also be placed under the democratic control and management of the working class, including elected representatives of workers and their trade unions, both within the energy industry and more broadly. Then the key decisions, including the price of energy, as well as a plan for investment in renewables, can be made in our interests, not those of the super-rich!