Capitalism’s ugliest face

When Ted Heath was Prime Minister in 1973 he coined the phrase “the unacceptable and ugly face of capitalism”.

He used to it describe the UK mining company Lonrho, for trading with apartheid Rhodesia, which became Zimbabwe.

Prime Minister Thatcher’s response was to privatise energy, railways, buses, steelmaking, telecommunications and shipbuilding. She encouraged private companies to run care homes, education and health.

Now, after two decades of privatisation, we see our services in crisis, the state subsidising the profits of these private companies and higher prices.

British Gas is to increase bills by 12.5 per cent as the wholesale

Labour’s just won its first councillor in Worthing in 40 years with a 17 per cent swing from the Tories. And in Margate we took a seat from UKIP with 58 per cent of the vote. I bet Corbyn’s past support of Venezuela didn’t get a mention on the doorsteps. As we saw in the General Election, Tory smears just don’t

work.

price of gas falls and parent company Centrica earns half year profits of £639million. Its chief executive Ian Conn pulls in more than £4million a year.

It would take the average worker 147 years to earn that.

We subsidise their greed. The Government gave £6billion of tax breaks to BP and Shell to boost declining North Sea production.

Theresa May is happy to let capitalism get uglier by the day.

She scrapped her election pledge to cap energy prices as soon as she won and axed rail electrification across the North.

The market has failed Britain. Housebuilding is down to its lowest rate in almost 100 years.

It’s time the Government got back to meeting the public interest by building the homes, supplying the energy and running the trains.

Instead of subsidising the profits of fat cats with a licence to print money – OUR money.