Liz Truss chose the worst option of a bad bunch on the energy crisis

While hundreds queued around the block to attend a protest meeting in Glasgow on Wednesday night, the new Prime Minister’s eyes and ears remained closed to the injustice at the heart of the crisis.

The Westminster government yesterday finally unveiled plans to ease household suffering after weeks of staring at its navel, transfixed and immobilised by an internal debate about whether it needs to move very much to the right or very, very much to the right. There was not a right option in this debate but it came as no surprise that the Tories chose the worst.

Even Liz Truss is not stupid enough to realise that if she does not act immediately to limit the impact of the energy crisis on households, she will be toast by Christmas.

True to form, she yesterday produced the package of measures she has been vaguely referring to during her leadership campaign. And true to form, it does nothing to seriously tackle the heart of the problem instead of the symptoms.

READ MORE: ALL Scottish Parliament business suspended until further notice after Queen's death

On what planet is it acceptable for energy giants to bank billions of pounds of extra profit generated by the same price rises which will see pensioners switch off their heating and freeze this winter and families worried about where the nest meal is coming from?

Yet Truss has firmly turned her back on any move to tackle those staggering profits and shows no interest in fundamentally changing the system which encourages them, beyond simply mouthing the platitude “never again”.

Let’s be clear: when Truss makes that vow, she does not mean we will never again see eye-watering profits for the few at the expense of the many. She has no objection to that. In fact, she actively wants to see it continue.

Does anyone really believe that the UK Government has only just discovered the ability to spend/borrow the £100bn estimated to be needed to pay for measures which include a cap on household energy bills of around £2500 a year. The Tories could have done it months ago. And they should have gone further when they did act. They should have included a realistic windfall tax on energy profits or a meaningful reform of a system which sees highly paid executives benefit from the misery of their customers.

It’s a fair bet that any suggestion of taking the energy supply into public ownership would continue to bring the new Prime Minister, her new Cabinet and her very old party members out in a cold sweat. As would any move to abandon the “free market” which hoodwinked us into believing competition among suppliers could allow us to save money when the reality was the opposite.

In fact, when you look at the plans Truss revealed yesterday it becomes apparent that not only has she refused to limit the energy companies’ never-ending hunger for ever-larger profits but she has vowed to use public money to protect the astronomical profits they have made so far.

A huge chunk of that £100bn will go on paying to energy companies the difference between the wholesale price for gas and electricity they pay and the amount they can charge customers. And they’ll continue to do so for two years, which means that the currently stratospheric bills will remain at that level for at least two years – so don’t even think about a reduction any time soon.

READ MORE: Nicola Sturgeon pays tribute to 'extraordinary' Queen after death at Balmoral

Don’t forget that the average annual household heating bill has already gone up considerably and will still go up by more than £500 next month (less any relief payments which some of the most vulnerable receive and which are in any case temporary).

Businesses will continue to face rising costs for energy, forcing up prices, including food prices. Some “equivalent” support is promised but the details are not yet clear.

Hospitality firms in Scotland – more than half of whom could close without a significant cap on fuel costs which some establishments have seen already rise from £2000 a month to more than £9000 – could still face ruin.

I’m sure we will all sleep easier in our chilly beds at night knowing that the energy firms won’t be losing money through Westminster’s emergency measures. Because if there’s one thing Liz Truss fears almost as much as a voter backlash, it’s an attack on the “investment” which she says a realistic windfall tax on energy profits would deter.

Who has benefited from all those years of “investment” by energy companies banking billions in profits generated by their customers? Never forget the figures. Almost £10bn profits for Shell between April and June this year. Promised payments to shareholders of £6.5bn. BP profits tripled to £7bn in the second quarter of this year. That’s the second highest quarterly profit in the company’s history.

What has the “investment” of profits like these done for the customers who have generated them? Have they reduced a single bill? Have they been ploughed into measures which will over the long term bring customers’ costs down? Or have they gone straight into the pockets of shareholders and to an even larger extent to the executives who even now scream blue murder at the merest mention of an extra windfall tax.

And now we are left watching as Truss explains to us why our money now has to subsidise those giant companies who have fleeced us for years to avoid – God forbid – any reduction in the investment which has done precisely nothing for the common good.

And while she does so, the new Prime Minister tries to deflect the blame for the scale of the current crisis on to the war in Ukraine. She has said: “Putin’s war in Ukraine and weaponisation of gas supply in Europe is causing global prices to rise …”. You don’t need to be an apologist for Putin’s reckless and awful invasion to spot a few holes in Truss’s determination to shift the focus of attention away from the very specific situation in the UK which sets our cost of living crisis apart from that elsewhere.

The situation in Ukraine has an impact all over Europe but it is much more severe in the UK. Research by the German bank Deutsche Bank shows that the average energy price rise in Eurozone countries this year is around 40%. UK gas prices rose nearly 90% in the year ended July.

In October, without government action, they were expected to rise another 80%.

France has kept gas prices frozen until at least the end of this year and capped the rise in electricity prizes to 4%. The French government is fully nationalising its energy producer EDF to protect its consumers from larger prices.

So while the Ukraine situation is obviously a factor in the energy crisis, don’t believe Truss when she tries to convince you it’s the only or even the main factor. There’s clearly something specific about how the UK government organises its energy industry which has exacerbated the problem.

Public patience is running out and the package announced by Truss yesterday is not enough to make households significantly more confident about the future. The protest group Enough Is Enough filled every seat in the Fruitmarket Gallery in Glasgow for a protest on Wednesday. Covid stopped me attending but reports of the event suggest that feelings are, not surprisingly, running high.

Scottish Trade Union Congress leader Roz Foyer and human rights lawyer Aamer Anwar spoke in favour of the five action points demanded by the organisation: a real pay rise; slash energy bills; end food poverty; decent homes for all; tax the rich.

There is no doubt that all five of these actions need to be enacted immediately and we should all do everything in our power to ensure that happens. However, there is another action point which would ensure the first five become a reality and that Scotland really can make sure that a crisis so severe, so unjust, so fundamentally dishonest “never again” plunges us into despair.

We learned this week that the Supreme Court has quite rightly agreed that the Scottish government can submit to the court its own arguments in support of its legal right to hold a second independence referendum.

Truss lost not a second upon her appointment to dismiss the democratic demands of the Scottish electorate for that referendum, a position underlined yet again by her Scottish Secretary Alister Jack this week.

The Supreme Court will take its decision on the matter next month and I’m not enough of a legal expert to attempt an accurate forecast of what that decision will be. I do believe, however, that justice and democracy demand that referendum should be held at a time of the Scottish Government’s choosing, and by that I mean October 2023.

Otherwise, what the Supreme Court would be saying is that there is no legal way that Scotland can secure a vote specifically on its own constitutional future unless a Westminster government undergoes a magical transformation.

If that is the case, then surely the Supreme Court would have to explain its redefinition of the Union, and indeed of democracy itself.