A Workers’ International Network meeting Sunday 24th April 2022
Matthew Jones, who has worked in the utilities sector for over twenty years, opens up a discussion about how we got here and what can be done.
Driven by their determination to bring in “markets” in place of the previous vertical integration of the production and supply of gas and electricity, in the 1980s Thatcher and the finance capitalists carried through a progamme of “deregulation” of the energy market in Britain. This creature of the neo-liberal state is now at the point of collapse throughout Europe. The cost and security supply of gas now threatens to derail whole economies, not least Germany. At the same time, the companies actually supplying gas and electricity are being squeezed to death – their workforces fearful of mass sackings, even as they create products at insane prices and send out bills that large numbers of households simply cannot afford to pay. The bosses of these companies have appeared in the British parliament pleading for Government action to mitigate the catastrophe they see all around them, and the red ink they can see piling up on their balance sheets.