Oppose Monopoly Dictate
Who Decides? We Decide!

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British Gas Profiteering:
Oppose Monopoly Dictate: Who Decides? We Decide!

The Workers Must Have A Programme For Public Utilities!

British Gas is making huge profits through monopoly dictate. In 2007, British Gas had appropriated their way to a £517m profit. This massive amount was pilfered by keeping prices high while British Gas and its shareholders benefited from a free fall in wholesale gas as a result of unusually mild weather and a new gas pipeline form Norway. This is the backdrop to fuel poverty which tragically expects to see between 25,000 and 40,000 more deaths every winter from people not being able to afford to heat their homes. People are being forced to choose whether to heat their homes or eat.

            About four million people are officially in fuel poverty, meaning they have to spend at least 10 per cent of their income on fuel bills. This injustice is created by a monopoly-controlled system by which giant corporations target the most poor and vulnerable, whose exploitation is being used to pay the rich.

            This profiteering by which energy companies are making huge profits from the needs of the people has taken an even worse turn in 2008. In January / February, the big six energy companies put up their prices by 15%. This theft from the people on behalf of the rich is a characteristic of monopoly control and cannot be addressed without addressing the decaying monopoly capitalist system and its claim on the wealth that the workers create.

            Not only do these energy companies such as British Gas make their massive profits by effectively stealing from the poor, but they also do this by claiming the added value created by the workers as their profit. British Gas workers themselves are being put under ever increasing bad conditions.

            The GMB union stated that as well as "fleecing its customers and making record profits", British Gas was scrapping its final salary pension scheme. "It is about time that a full inquiry was conducted into the operation of the energy market," said Gary Smith, GMB's national secretary.

            Now Ofgem, the energy industry regulator, has launched an investigation. This investigation is to look if energy customers are getting a fair deal, but what really should be asked especially in light of the question of the Northern Rock crisis, is who should own our energy resources? Who should decide on the future of energy based on the needs of working class and people? It is the working class and people themselves who should decide, building a society centred on the human being.

Whereas the 19th century saw a programme of public works which the industrial capitalists required to provide the infrastructure for the developing socialised economy, the 20th century saw the recognition, consistent with the ascendancy of the working class, that society has a responsibility to provide these services to the people. Now in the 21st century with the enlightened thinking that society should take responsibility for its members, a new programme, based on modern definitions must be developed and put forward by the working class.

            As part of building the Workers’ Opposition, it is imperative that the demand is made that energy and other utilities should be provided to all society’s members as of right; it is a government that is truly representative of the working class and people that should take responsibility for providing utilities to the society. It is simply a conciliation to monopoly right that privatised utility monopolies are merely “regulated”, on the grounds that “competition” itself will benefit the “consumer”.

            Public utilities should not be run for the financiers and for the profit of a few, but these public utilities must be run on the basis of being social programmes that are necessities to lives of the human being akin to housing, food and clothing. It is a function of a modern state to abide by this principle and ensure that funds are accumulated from the social product that are applied to the provision and expansion of the energy needs of the people and are denied to the financiers.

            It must be acknowledged that by dint of being human the right to public utilities is inviolable as a necessity of living. As a necessary response to the profiteering of the privatised utilities, the workers, in building their resistance to monopoly right and building the political movement of the Workers’ Opposition, fight to restrict monopoly right, taking this resistance up as a conscious programme to stop paying the rich. The workers must take up this fight with the orientation of developing a programme based on the human factor/social consciousness by which the people will be guaranteed to be able to live without adversity. The working class must put forward their plan in an effort to plant the alternative firmly on the consciousness of the people of England, Scotland and Wales.

            Such a plan for the energy needs of the people must be to meet these constantly expanding needs centred on the claims of society’s members and developing a self-reliant economy on this basis. This plan must also take account of the claims of Mother Earth, which nurtures humankind, and must end the despoliation of the environment in the interests of human existence, and put a stop to the militarisation of the economy which puts the claims of the warmongers for control of human and material resources in the first place, following the dogmas of being competitive in the global market.

            WDIE calls on the working class and people to fight for such a programme that truly reflects their will to have control over public utilities through a government who truly reflects this will in the most democratic way.