I HOLD no candle for Rory Stewart, the failed Conservative leadership candidate who was shockingly given an hour-long documentary by the BBC during the 2014 Scottish independence campaign in order to expound his eccentric theory that a sense of Scottish nationhood is a historically recent aberration overlying a far more ancient and organic “Britishness”.
It was blatant anti-independence propaganda dressed up as a documentary, and of course the BBC has never deigned to explain the commissioning process which led to this hour-long advert for Better Together being broadcast.
However, even a broken clock is right twice a day, and at Prime Minister's Questions on May 15, 2013, when David Cameron was prime minister, Stewart warned Parliament that the UK’s electricity network was "creaking" and close to failure.
Cameron, May and Johnson all turned a blind eye to the UK's energy problems. They used to blame the EU for the UK's homegrown problems and failures in an energy policy which is wholly reserved to Westminster, now they blame Putin.
Johnson's likely successor Liz Truss appears set to continue the same sorry and self-serving pattern. Mind you, given that Truss has pulled out of every one-on-one interview during the course of the Conservative leadership contest, it's evident that Truss does not accept scrutiny. She might well just pull out of future Prime Minister's Questions, depriving Rory Stewart of the opportunity to say "I told you so" as there is a very real threat of the UK suffering blackouts during the winter. Millions of people may simply switch off their gas and electric because they are unable to afford their bills.
The leader of Shetland Council Emma Macdonald has written to the Chancellor warning that 96% of households in an island group which produces much of the UK's energy will face fuel poverty this winter. She estimates that a household in Shetland will face an annual energy bill of more than £10,000 per year by next year – twice that in the rest of the UK. They will require an annual income of more than £100,000 a year in order to avoid fuel poverty. Many households will simply be unable to afford their energy bills.
That is a truly shocking statistic which illustrates the depth of the failure of energy policy in the UK. The people who live on the islands whose offshore waters produce much of the UK's domestic oil and gas will freeze while the large energy companies reap massive record profits. If that does not tell you that the Conservatives have systematically mismanaged the energy industry in the UK, nothing will.
Meanwhile, large companies continue to post record profits and award their bosses huge pay increases while imposing pay rises on their workers which are well below the rate of inflation. BT made £1.3 billion profit last year and paid its chief executive £3.5 million – a rise of 32% on his already huge pay package – but the company has imposed an effective pay cut on its workers.
It has been said before, but it is worth repeating: this is not a cost of living crisis, it is a corporate greed crisis. A crisis fed and encouraged by successive Conservative governments. No wonder more and more sectors are beset by industrial action. However, the Conservative response to this is to threaten to crack down on the right of unions to organise and workers to take industrial action, not to tax the profiteering and the corporate greed.
As all this goes on, in Scotland the Conservatives demand that the Scottish Government “do something” about a problem which was entirely created by the Conservatives. The Scottish Government lacks the legal and financial powers to solve the problem, it can only tinker at the edges in the hope of ameliorating the worst effects of the crisis. It's like putting a sticking plaster on your broken leg while the Conservatives at Westminster enthusiastically keep taking a sledgehammer to your knee caps.
This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.
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