Time to determine our own future
The cost-of-living crisis is the worst situation most Scots have faced since the 1970s and the days of the Three Day Week and Ted Heath.
But the response from the UK Government has been straight out of the 18th century and telling the people “let them eat cake.”
Energy firms have lived the life of Riley over the years, scooping up billions of pounds of profits off the backs of electricity and gas customers.
Through that time our interests as consumers are supposed to be protected by the energy regulator, Ofgem.
Instead they’ve seemed content to allow these multibillion pound companies gouge customers even more while pleading poverty.
We’ll see just how hard the last few months have been on their balance sheets when their next accounts are published – but I doubt we’ll be hearing many stories about chief executives relying on food banks.
At its core the fault lies with successive UK Governments who have allowed three decades of energy privatisation and deregulation to envelop our economy.
That strategy may have seemed worthwhile during the good times, but national energy policy should be designed for the bad times too.
Now the chickens have come home to roost, and it’s ordinary households across the country that are paying the price.
Instead of investment in our energy infrastructure and a quicker transition to renewables – clean and safe from the uncertainties of the international market – our energy future has been gambled away, leaving us at the mercies of overseas dictators and gangsters, with predictable results.
The answers from the Chancellor and Prime Minister have been simply pathetic.
Loading on debt to everyone’s electricity bills – with no way to opt out – is simply storing up more problems for coming years.
And while they and their right-wing cheerleaders in the gutter press would rather Brexit wasn’t mentioned in this context, the impact their kamikaze withdrawal from the world’s biggest trading bloc has had on prices was predicted the minute they chose to hold their selfdestructive referendum in 2016.
Food and drink producers said we would pay more for basic foods if we left the EU, and they were right.
Freight companies and logistics operators said the costs and barriers in importing goods would soar, and they were right.
Industry experts said Brexit would reduce exports from this country and costs jobs and income, and they were right.
The last years have seen the UK take part in the biggest act of national self-destruction in decades, and all the while the Prime Minister and his minions have used Downing Street as their private party venue while pandemics sweep these islands and households are financially squeezed as ever before.
No government is perfect and those in Europe no doubt have their problems and maybe even a few chancers in their midst – but surely nothing compared to the parade of incompetents, spivs, extremists, buffoons, and downright nasty individuals who make up the Government of the United Kingdom.
They have presided over 12 years of economic failure, attacks on the poorest and most vulnerable, and now sit back while the carnage they have helped shape wreaks havoc on millions of people who are doing their best to keep their heads above water.
We can surely do better than this.
We don’t have to accept yet more years of stagnation, decline, and the waste of human potential that falling living standards will mean.
We will soon have the chance in Scotland to seize the opportunity to begin the task of building a better country that works in the interests of all, not the few, rather than be governed by those we never elected.
When that opportunity comes, I hope we all remember the years and lives wasted at the hands of the UK Government – and choose a better future for our country.