Everything is going up for most of us - as increased fuel costs and other unspoken factors - has triggered a significant rise in the cost of living. Oddly enough this steep rise in our living costs has been matched by a significant increase in the profits of oil and gas giants.
On Tuesday evening it was revealed that BP has paid £0 tax in the UK in the past five years, despite just posting profits of £13 billion pounds. This revelation has put even more pressure on Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, to do more to help the poorest families with sky-rocketing energy bills and the cost of living.
The Party soon perhaps to be known as New New Labour (perhaps Labour 2.0) has called for a one-off, pandemic crisis windfall tax to ease the burden on Britons facing staggering costs. An obvious strategy which even if implemented, utterly fails to address the fact the the whole energy set up for these islands is fundamentally broken and utterly incapable of delivering cheap sustainable renewable energy.
We also need, and this is very important. we need to end our dependence on gas and oil imported from unstable regions and despotic states by achieving energy independence. The Westminster based political parties have effectively entirely failed to achieve this objective.
It would also be for democracy in general to shatter or at least drag into public view the questionably cozy relationship that exists between the big six energy cartel members and some politicians and political parties - be it well paid post politics jobs on the board, donations (just exactly do they get for their money?), sponsoring events at party conference(s), full page full colour adverts in conference programmes, or free tickets for sporting events (very nice but just what is expected in return for the tickets?).
