Civil disobedience is coming
by Thomas Fazi, UnHerd:
Britain may be recovering from a heatwave, but its politicians are already fearful that winter is coming. Only now, more than 170 days since the war broke out, are policymakers realising the potentially catastrophic implications of their gung-ho approach towards Russia.
Just last week, it was revealed that the UK government is preparing for a “reasonable worst-case scenario” over the winter in which below-average temperatures and gas shortages could force authorities to trigger emergency gas-saving measures, including organised blackouts for industry and even households. And this is as energy prices continue to spiral out of control: this winter, the average annual energy bill for a typical household is expected to reach £4,200, or about £350 a month — more than double what households are currently paying and a four-fold increase on the average bill paid just a year ago.
The social consequences would be nothing short of catastrophic, potentially pushing 10.5 million households — a third of the total — into poverty, exacerbating what is already the UK’s worst cost-of-living crisis in decades. Yet even when faced with a campaign of civil disobedience, calling on people to cancel their energy direct debits, the government hasn’t been able to come up with anything better than offering households a one-off £400 discount on their fuel bills in October (and a bit more for those on means-tested benefits). Downing Street’s “strategy” to get through the winter seems to be to hunker down and hope for the best.
[…] as economic policies have become tailored to the interests of a handful of immensely powerful mega-corporations, any sense of the collective or national interest was lost. A small elite was allowed to accrue immense wealth and power, while laying waste to our societies’ workforce, industrial capacity, public services and vital infrastructures, leaving our countries poorer, weaker and dependent on foreign (and increasingly hostile) nations for the supply of everything from energy to food to basic medical supplies.
The interests of this small financial-corporate elite were always at odds with those of the rest of us. And we have now reached the point where they have become so divorced from the latter that they threaten the very survival of society itself — we have, in other words, entered a phase of self-cannibalisation of Western capital. One need only think back to the pandemic and how a handful of Big Tech and Big Pharma companies pushed for measures that made them mind-bogglingly rich, even at the cost of causing incalculable damage to our societies and economies; or how Western oil companies today are exploiting the energy crisis to rake in record profits, even at the cost of driving the rest of the economy into the ground.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
