PAY 100 BILLION OR WE CRASH THE ECONOMY!
Liz Truss will continue to push through a payoff of over £100bn to her former employers Shell along with the other big Five energy companies to stop them from crashing the economy with their ongoing extortionate price hikes, despite parliament being cancelled for the next week.
The government is postponing most business until after the Queen’s funeral, but Truss’s team will continue to implement the package. There had been concerns that the 10-day parliamentary recess for mourning could prevent emergency legislation needed to stop the energy price cap from rising automatically to just over £3,500 on 1 October.
The prime minister’s official spokesman said on Friday that the two-year energy price guarantee (Payoff) will be ready for households from 1 October, as scheduled.
This payoff to the Energy companies from the public purse will mean that the Energy companies will not charge households directly above their already maxed-out price increase of up to £2500 a year.
Ms Truss announced the strategy on Thursday in the hours before the Queen’s death. Paid for with tens of billions of pounds of borrowing, it guarantees that for two years bills for the average home will not increase past £2,500, paying the energy companies direct and stopping them from extorting households with the threatened increase to £3,500 a year on the 1st of October.
The energy price cap was meant to rise from £1,971 to £3,549 next month, but that will be cancelled. Instead, the annual amount the average household pays on energy will be set at around £2,500. All 28 million households will keep the £400 annual discount announced earlier in the year
On Friday, Downing Street said plans would be put in place to ensure the support package was made available in time, and suggested that legislation would not be needed for the £2,500 cap on average bills to be put in place.
“The public should be reassured that the energy price guarantee will be in place for households from 1 October, as planned,” Truss’s official spokesperson said.
“We’re implementing that guarantee initially through private contracts with suppliers rather than through legislation, so this mourning period doesn’t impact that introduction.
“We’re working urgently now on the wider aspects of the policy to ensure it can be delivered. As it stands, we do not believe the mourning period would impact on delivery of the policy, neither do we think it requires any sort of legislative moments during the mourning period.
“We will be working with the Speaker to introduce any legislation that is required for as soon as possible after the mourning period concludes.”
This means the government will be giving away billions to energy companies without scrutiny or accountability. There will be no one in parliament to ask the rudimentary questions never mind more interment questions on guarantees and contracts.
With ministers holding back from outlining further details during the mourning period, energy suppliers are expected to contact customers before 1 October to explain how the announcement affects them.
Energy suppliers have said that they would soon be contacting customers about what the government plan will mean for their bills. E.On has made clear fixed tariff bill payers would not need to change their contract to benefit from the guarantee.
Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng – who has yet to set out how much it will cost the government to subsidise energy suppliers for extra wholesale costs – still needs to find a date to reveal his emergency package.
A YouGov published after the PM’s announcement on Thursday found little enthusiasm for the plan, with just 24 per cent of people believe it provides the right amount of help. Some 3 per cent of people believe the cap provides too much help – but the majority, 56 per cent, say it is too little.
However, it’s hard to find anyone that thinks public money should be used to payoff the greedy oligarchs holding the country to ransom.
Extortion by the oligarchy
UK taxpayers will be on the hook for as much as £200 billion over the next 18 months to cover the cost of Prime Minister Liz Truss’s plans to contain energy prices, according to people familiar with the policy.
Documents seen by Bloomberg state that energy suppliers will “receive funding from HM Government” to cover the difference between wholesale market costs and what they are legally allowed to charge customers. As currently structured, those costs would be financed out of government borrowing, the people said, asking not to be named because the discussions are private. A spokesman for Truss declined to comment.
As currently drawn up, the package includes £130 billion to freeze household bills until April 2024 and a discount scheme for business that could cost up to £67 billion over 12 months, the documents show.
The scale of the support comes close to the £310 billion handed out during the pandemic and will add about 10% to the UK’s £2.3 trillion in national debt. Borrowing that amount would drive the budget deficit to level that have only been seen in modern times during the global financial crisis and the Covid pandemic.
Let’s call it what it is, this is extortion by the oligarchy, facilitated by their agents, the government or more precisely, this Kleptocracy masquerading as a government.
A Tory government that is complacent in the gangster tactics being carried out by the Energy companies that have such great powers over us with their monopoly of our natural resources. Energy companies who will collectively make over £170 billion in excess profits over the next two years.
You may well ask what are ‘Excess profits’ these are profits defined by the Treasury as the difference between the profits energy producers are predicted to make in the future, and the profits they could have expected to make based on the outlook for prices before they started to extort the market in December 2021 by raising prices.
It may cost more but in the long run, it would be cheaper to Nationalise and build our own rigs in the Gas rich North Sea, after all the country actually owns the ground and minerals under it.
Ironically in 2021 The crown estate’s first auction of its seabed licences in a decade earnt the former Queen’s property manager £879m a year, for up to 10 years, and clear the way for six new offshore windfarms and enough clean electricity generation for more than 7m homes.
It’s our seabed and our oil and gas…
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