Nationalise The Energy Companies
The Owen Jones Podcast
Owen Jones
4.4 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 4 August 2022
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
These two statistics sum up how broken British society is: while BP are making £6.9bn worth of profits - a 14 year high - typical household energy bills are forecast to hit more than £3,600 a year.
We should never have surrendered the natural monopoly of the energy industry to profiteers in the first place. We're joined by the incredible expert Mathew - Lawrence - founder and director of UK-based think tank Common Wealth - to explain why the industry is broken, why the energy company's arguments against more taxes are total bunk - and why we should bring the sector under public ownership for the sake of struggling families, a broken economy and society - and the future of the planet.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, welcome to the show. I am fresh of a plane from Italy to do this very special show today, |
| 0:14.0 | because this is, I think, obviously one of the biggest social crises facing the country, |
| 0:18.8 | Britain's households have been reduced to cash machines for the shareholders of the big |
| 0:24.6 | energy giants. Now, I hope, or we have a better social and economic order, ever the optimist, |
| 0:30.8 | that historians will look back at the broken model of the 2020s. And just look at these two |
| 0:37.2 | statistics alongside each other, which really do not need any further explanation, which is |
| 0:43.6 | that BP, one of the energy companies alone, made £6.9 billion worth of profits. That's the second |
| 0:52.1 | highest ever, whilst the average household energy bill in this country is expected to reach more |
| 0:57.8 | than £3,600 a year by the winter, a bleak winter indeed. Now, obviously, millions of households |
| 1:06.4 | cannot afford this. This is a country in which parents skip hot meals to make sure that their |
| 1:12.6 | children are fed. This is where people lie awake at night, of course, panicking over the |
| 1:18.1 | unopened energy bills. Now, those shareholders can expect, in terms of the misery they can expect, |
| 1:25.6 | are hand-govers from one too many champagne dinners, courtesy of the massive dividends being shoved |
| 1:32.0 | into their bank banners. Now, some will say all the toys did a windfall tax. They did a windfall |
| 1:36.7 | tax back in May after huge pressure. They buckled. Now, the extra 25% of the companies, |
| 1:42.5 | the big energy companies expected to pay, only applies from three weeks ago. So these vast |
| 1:46.7 | profits were talking about. They're not going to be affected at all. And let's say it's on |
| 1:50.5 | their essentially profiteering from the war in Ukraine, which is, of course, what has been attributed, |
| 1:55.6 | what's been held responsible for this surge. Now, what we're going to do today is we're going to |
| 2:00.9 | talk about why the energy industry, which, in the 1980s, the Thatcherism handed over wholesale |
| 2:08.0 | to private profiteers, why it's broken. But crucially as well, what we're going to do is talk about |
| 2:12.9 | where we go next. Now, one of the things we are going to talk about is actually the case for a more |
... |
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