August 7, 2008 - By Martin Wingfield

THERE has been yet another massive hike in gas prices as British families pay the price of Thatcher’s Conservative privatisation policy and New Labour’s commitment to the global market economy.

At the end of July ‘British‘ Gas raised prices by an obscene 35%, even beating the greedy 22% hike a few days earlier by EDF (Electricite de France). Millions of British families, and especially pensioners, are facing “fuel poverty” this winter, yet all the while the owner of ‘British‘ Gas, Centrica, is now making £5 million profit a day. A few days after its latest outrageous extortion from the British public, Centrica shamelessly increased dividends to its shareholders from 3.35p a share to 3.9p.

Centrica Chief Executive Sam Laidlaw tried to spin things in best New Labour style:
“This is a business that has got a million shareholders – a lot of pension funds and people have got their savings invested in British Gas shares and we have to look after them”.

No doubt he hoped to create an image of British grannies gratefully banking their dividends from the shares they bought when Thatcher sold the British people their own gas industry in the 1980’s. Of course, if there are any such grannies still left as shareholders, they will find the extra dividends more than wiped out by the far higher fuel prices privatisation has freed City fat cats like Laidlaw to squeeze out of them.

And Mr Laidlaw was careful not to mention the name of his biggest shareholder – Petronas, an oil firm largely controlled by the Islamist-influenced government of Muslim Malaysia. It will also be richer because the price of Centrica shares rose 1.7% as City sharks around the world patted it on the back for its latest successful persecution of helpless British families.

Across the Channel, our French neighbours must be congratulating themselves on not making our mistakes. The French power industry was never privatised, the French Government never sold off the family silver, so EDF, 85% French State owned, is making a fortune out of selling power in Britain to the benefit of the ordinary people of France.

Today, six mostly foreign-owned energy corporations control our supplies raising prices in lockstep and squeezing ever more profit out of ordinary British families. This Labour Government has done nothing to curb their profits, and has refused to help consumers by capping the soaring bills we pay to light and heat our homes. Instead Gordon Brown prates hardline Tory nostrums about leaving prices to market forces, advising ordinary Britons to “shop around” in search of the best price from the sharks. Even though a committee of MPs have warned that this ‘market’ is anything but a free market and that millions of Britons now face serious poverty thanks to spiralling fuel prices.

Conservative and Labour Governments squandered our North Sea oil and gas reserves, selling them off to foreign multinationals. Norway kept its reserves and the profits from them in the hands of the Norwegian people, so they have a nest-egg now to cushion them from hard times, and indeed have husbanded their reserves so they haven’t been exhausted. As the global oil barons suck out the last drops of British oil and gas, it is expected that the proportion of gas Britain imports – to produce over a third of our electricity as well as directly to supply to gas users – will rise from 60% this year to 73% in 2009.

A few years ago we produced all our own gas , and if, like the French and the Norwegians, we hadn’t sold off our gas industry to global big business, we would now, like the French and the Norwegians, be able to provide the power our industry and people need. Instead, we are left to fork out more to huge foreign conglomerates or freeze in the dark.

A British National Party Government would reverse Margaret Thatcher’s Tory privatisation of our power supplies and bring them back under state control. Essential services are just that, essential, and it is the duty of any Government to provide them for the people, that’s what we pay our taxes for. There is no place for private profit in the provision of power to Britain’s homes – it must be provided at the lowest possible cost.