I was not surprised to learn today that the chief executive of British Gas’s owner Centrica is called Iain Conn. Apart from a slight misspelling, his surname is a fair description of the 12.5% increase in electric prices by said company. Many people I know haven’t seen their pay rise for as much as 12.5% throughout much of the last decade. It’s a massive hit and why is it happening?
I thought that flogging off the utilities was going to free up the industries to genuine competition and get the poor bloody consumer some good deals. What a fool I was. It turns out that the privatised companies are in a race to charge as much as they can get away with. Competition my arse.
And what sort of competition is it anyway? There are God knows how many gas and electric providers that I am surprised there is enough room for all their power lines and pipes, but of course it isn’t like that at all. Each provider doesn’t have its own individual pipeline: the same one is shared by all the providers which means that each company has to provide money for its shareholders and the money has to come from somewhere, or more precisely, someone. That someone is you and me and every other poor bugger who requires gas and electric simply to live a normal life.
They’ve got us by the short and curlies, haven’t they? It’s a monopoly dressed up as competition because it’s not a genuine competition at all.
I am not in a hurry for the government to take back the utilities into public ownership, although somewhere down the line I hope it happens, but I would like to see much stricter regulation. They should not be allowed to carry on ripping us off. Anyway, these companies have no principles at all. For years, the very poorest people in the land, who paid for their power through key meters charged in the local shop paid the highest prices. For so long as they were able to get away with it, they kept their mouths shut. Until they were rumbled, their practices were exposed and they were shamed into not ripping off the poor by as much as they used to. So they now rip off everyone instead.
I know to many people, rising fuel charges are a slight pain, a minor nuisance or of no consequence at all. But for a sizeable minority of many millions, fuel bills are a matter of life and death. Literally. If we’re going to allow these companies to own our energy and fuel, then government must clip their wings, stop them whacking up prices shortly after announcing vast profits. Theresa May’s last government promised to do just that and she should not be allowed to forget it.
