A very Tory Christmas

This Christmas many will struggle to enjoy a Christmas at all with the rising cost of living and the austerity which is really biting now for many ordinary people. This is Tory Britain where half a million people are reported to be using a food bank now to get by. This is a national disgrace now that the Red Cross has an appeal for support for the people in the UK we know something is very wrong in the world. Not that it wasn’t before but this hasn’t happened since the war. So while we all struggle to enjoy a Christmas dinner the Tories will be living it up in the nicely warmed tax payer funded homes or one of their many homes I should say as most do have more than one if not more these days. For the Tories any thought of the poor over Christmas will be a distant thought if at all. Those who they are making pay for the crisis of capitalism are just collateral damage to them it would seem. The bosses of the 'big six' energy companies should be in the dock. 31,000 extra people, mostly pensioners, died last winter. With 3.2 million households in fuel poverty and one in four families forced to choose between eating and heating, how many more will die this winter? With almost calculating cruelty, all the big energy suppliers have announced more and bigger price hikes just as we go into winter. Even Ofgem, the toothless regulator, has admitted: "There is a deep mistrust of anything the energy companies do or say... It is not surprising the customers jump to the conclusion that prices are driven by profiteering." It is not surprising because it's true! Fuel bills have gone up 152% in the last ten years. Their profits have gone up 74% since 2009, to £3.74 billion last year. Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) pay over 60% of their profits to shareholders in dividends, and npower haven't paid any UK tax for the last three years! British Gas paid just five bosses £16.4 million in bonuses in March this year. Parent company Centrica's chief executive Sam Laidlaw got £4.9 million in salary and bonuses last year, enough to pay the annual fuel bills of 3,500 households. Huge public anger has forced politicians to be seen to be doing something. They all say "switch suppliers" but the big six, with 95% of all domestic customers, operate a price cartel and run a virtual monopoly. The Con-Dems advised people suffering fuel poverty to wear an extra jumper, the Centrica boss said wear two! Ed Miliband says a Labour government would freeze energy prices for 20 months but we all know they'll just stick them up before and after. This Christmas will not be a happy one for those at the bottom end of the scale. Lets fight for a world where Christmas’s are not something to dread how we can afford it how we can enjoy things with our families and friends but one rid of capitalism where we live happily with a society which meets peoples needs before anything else is considered.