As bills rise again – nationalise the rip-off energy profiteers

With the announcement that energy bills for a ‘typical’ household will rise by £111 a year from April, a 6.4% increase, millions of working-class families will despair at further increasing pressure on household incomes. This article – written in January 2025 and before the most recent announcement of another increase – by Lynda McEwan makes the case for the urgent nationalisation of the profiteering energy companies.

Happy New Year’s greetings from the energy companies! UK households will feel the heat, or lack of, as their bills increase once again in 2025.

The average family will pay an extra £21 on top of  their current gas and electricity bills. Hundreds of thousands of pensioners have had their winter fuel payment snatched unceremoniously off of them by the Labour government and the SNP Scottish government, and will be faced with the despicable choice between heating or eating this winter. 

People are drowning in an avalanche of debt, missing direct debit payments regularly. The payment failure rate was at 2.16% in September 2024, up from 1.73% from the previous year. 41% are using less fuel and 38% are spending less on food shopping and essentials. This is not sustainable. 

We would need a mass community campaign to prevent people from being cut off or forced on to prepayment meters.

This should be taken up by the trade unions who could help coordinate any such action. The SNP Scottish government could also legislate against these actions by the power companies.

Analysts predict that prices will fall slightly from April through October [how wrong they were], but states that high domestic prices will likely be the “new normal”. We cannot and should not accept this. 

Whole sale prices of gas and oil  are dropping yet consumer prices have gone up and so have the profits of the capitalists. 

British Gas, which trades as Scottish Gas in Scotland, reported profits of £751 million at the end of December, a massive tenfold increase since 2022. 

Sharon Graham, Unite’s general secretary, has called for public ownership of the energy companies, which is a step in the right direction. Socialist Party Scotland has been calling for this since before the energy and cost of living crisis began.

However we call for the socialist nationalisation of the entire energy and chemical sector. This would mean all the energy companies being ran under democratic workers’ control and management with profits being used to keep energy bills low and for investment into green renewable energy. 

The SNP Scottish government has said they will mitigate the cut to the winter fuel allowance but they won’t do this until 2026. Why not do it now?

It would cost £160 million to do so which is nothing in comparison to the possibility of pensioners perishing in poverty. They even refuse to set up a public energy company. 

Labour’s promise of state owned GB energy has so far not materialised and even so this would just be another company which would compete with the private sector. 

The only way to ensure that the working class do not shoulder the burden of capitalism’s abject failures is through the socialist transformation of society.

Energy, like food and housing, is a basic human right that people should not have to worry about affording.