Callum Joyce, Oxford Socialist Party
Gas and electricity supplier Octopus Energy recently announced a deal to buy competitor Bulb Energy from the government for between £100 and £200 million. This comes after Ofgem, the government department responsible for regulating the UK’s energy industry, took control of Bulb when it ran into financial difficulties last year.
The size of the state bailout has so far reached an estimated £2 billion. But it is not known what the value of Bulb, which currently supplies energy to around 1.5 million people, is. The government and Octopus have declined to publish the details.
But we have the right to know where taxpayers’ money, much of it taken from the working class, has been going. Ofgem must open Bulb’s books to the public and allow the trade unions and those affected by the sale to examine its finances.
Despite Octopus’s slick design and branding, intended to suggest that it is the most environmentally conscious of the energy companies, the company fundamentally exists to generate profits for its shareholders. It would not have gone ahead with the purchase if it did not see significant financial gain in doing so.
Did Octopus really pay full value, or have the government effectively handed the company back to the private sector after a huge amount of public spending, as they did with the banks after 2007-08?
The government bailouts demonstrate the failures of the capitalist market. Squeezed for every drop of profit, charging sky-high prices and paying staff low wages, privately owned energy companies have been unable to withstand economic shocks.
Temporary nationalisation, before selling companies back to the private sector, offers no long-term solution. Companies remain vulnerable to future shocks, and continue to extract profits by hiking prices and squeezing wages.
To start to deal with the cost-of-living crisis we need full nationalisation of the energy companies under democratic control by the trade unions, the employees of these companies, and consumers. Democratic socialist planning of the energy industry would ensure it is efficiently run to meet people’s needs, not to line the pockets of the rich while ordinary people freeze in their own homes.
Unfortunately there is no establishment party that is prepared to fight for these ideas. Talk of nationalisation is anathema to free-market Tory politicians, and Labour leader Keir Starmer has categorically ruled out the idea of nationalising energy under a Labour government. That is why the Socialist Party campaigns for trade unions and socialists across the country to take steps towards forming a new mass workers’ party, one which fights for these ideas and for the socialist transformation of society to put an end to this profiteering capitalist system.
