A Winters Tale

The Debate Over The Winter Fuel Payments Is Another Case Of Distraction and Deception

At the brutal farce that is the labour party conference this week much has been made by some union leaders of the fact that the conference voted against the introduction of means testing on winter fuel payments. This is a classic case of deception on the part of all concerned in this farce. Even if Starmer and his clique lose a conference vote this means absolutely nothing in terms of government policy. Blair and Brown both lost votes at the labour party conference when they were in power and it made precisely zero difference. The clique that runs the labour party has never been concerned with the opinions of anyone other than the ruling class and that is not about change now no matter how many virtue signalling tweets Sharon Graham puts out.  The farcical nature of this debate though goes beyond the posturing at the labour party conference or even the policy of means testing the winter fuel payments. The issue that the politicians and the lying whores in the capitalist media will never discuss is why energy prices are so high that millions of British workers cannot afford to heat their homes and feed their families. The fact that the subsidy had to be introduced for pensioners in the first place was already a sign that the cost of living was outstripping the meagre incomes of many retired workers. So why doesn’t the labour party conference or the TUC (who have just held their own conference) get to the heart of the matter? The fact is that energy prices are as high as they because of three factors:

A) The privatised nature of the energy system in Britain 

B) The lack of domestic energy production capacity 

C) The disruption caused by the sanctions on Russian energy 

Out of these three points it is the first that is the most important. The privatisation of the energy system in Britain has led to a lack of investment in building new energy production facilities and the usual price gouging by the parasites who control these companies. Rather than arguing about means testing a subsidy for pensioners, the demand that all workers should be raising is for the end of the private ownership of energy production and the nationalisation without compensation of all the parasitic companies involved in ripping off the working class. The labour party won’t touch this of course because they are a party dedicated to serving the parasitic interests of the ruling class and the energy market is one big source of profit.  It is a demand that we as a class must raise though, not because we believe that nationalisation under capitalism will solve all of our problems but we must make workers aware of where the true nature of the problem lies, what is really causing their bills to always go up and never go down.  Unless we truly understand the problem we will always be misled by the fake debates engaged in by the labour party and its trade union flunkies.