British People Suffer under Rising Energy Bills While Brown Gives £120 million to Afghanistan

More than ten million British households were dealt a fresh blow to their finances yesterday as E.ON and Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) became the latest power companies to raise gas and electricity bills by as much as 29%.

At exactly the same time, Gordon Brown announced “aid packages” amounting to £120 million for Afghanistan — taking money directly from the pockets of British taxpayers who are expected to fund half the Third World while not being able to pay for their own utilities.

E.ON, which has 5.5 million customers in the UK, announced that it would increase prices by 16% for electricity and 26% for gas.

Hours later SSE, the country’s second-biggest energy supplier, with 8.5 million customers, said that it was increasing electricity and gas prices by 19% and 29% respectively.

The increases will nudge the number of households living in fuel poverty above the five million mark for the first time in more than a decade.

Adam Scorer, of Energywatch, the consumer group, said that the rises pointed to a calamitous failure of competition in Britain’s energy market. “We have seen four price rises in four weeks,” he said.

On the same day, Brown said Britain would put more resources into training the Afghan army and pledged an extra £60 million for development in that country.

“In the future we will put more resources into the training and mentoring of the Afghan army,” Gordon Brown told a news conference in Kabul.

Brown also pledged an additional £60 million for an internationally administered trust fund that channels aid to the Afghan government. The money would be used to pay teachers’ salaries and fund development work, especially healthcare.

* In 2006, Brown gave £7.5 billion of British taxpayers’ money to “finance education in Africa.”