United Kingdom: Families face astronomical energy bills
The scale of Britain’s energy crisis just became “suddenly and shockingly real,” said The Guardian in an editorial. Families were already struggling to pay their bills, thanks to high prices resulting from Russia’s war in Ukraine. Now energy regulator Ofgem has announced an 80 percent rise in the annual energy price cap for suppliers—a cap that is pegged to market rates and must go up when global gas prices do—on top of its earlier huge rise in April. That means British energy bills could nearly triple over last year’s as the country enters the winter months, forcing families to make hard choices between buying food or keeping the heat on. The rates could rise further in January and April, perhaps by the same amount once again. Hundreds of thousands of citizens face having their electricity and gas turned off, while millions “will be plunged into intolerable debt” to prevent that horror. “No decent society can allow it to happen.” Yet the ruling Conservative Party, distracted by its leadership election to replace lame-duck Prime Minister Boris Johnson, has responded with indifference.
The new cap hikes will leave the lowest-paid workers saddled with energy bills “higher than their monthly pay,” said Jacob Jaffa in The Sun, which could “force thousands of Brits into debt.” Average energy bills are set to increase from $2,293 to $4,128 per year. When the cost of food and rent is taken into account, even middle-income Brits with salaries around $26,300 will be hard-pressed to meet their bills. Families and businesses will be crushed without “further state support,” said the Financial Times in an editorial. The small and medium-sized businesses responsible for 60 percent of U.K. jobs cannot simply “absorb soaring bills and pass on price increases to consumers.” In the short term, there’s no other solution but direct payments to the poorest and those on fixed incomes, and direct support to businesses through grants and rebates.
Yet our likely next prime minister says she doesn’t believe in giving people direct aid, said Donnachadh McCarthy in The Independent. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, who is leading former chancellor Rishi Sunak by 22 percentage points in polls in the race to succeed Johnson, said she would solve the energy price crisis in the “Conservative way” by “lowering the tax burden, not giving out handouts.” Truss, who used to be commercial manager for the oil giant Shell, has proposed “a massive ramping up” of North Sea oil projects, a resumption of fracking on the British mainland, and “a frenzied building of eye-wateringly expensive new nuclear power plants.” Yet “if Britain’s economy is not to sink like the Titanic,” she will have to help consumers now, not just provide energy later. It’s unfortunate that Truss will “almost certainly” have to implement “an enormous bailout for the public and for industry,” said The Daily Telegraph in an editorial. But at least she will return the country to a culture of personal responsibility after that—indeed, that’s why Conservatives prefer her. “The age in which large parts of the population looked to the government to fix all of their problems has to come to an end.”