“The British energy industry risks seeing more suppliers collapsing on the back of so-called “bad debts” arising from consumer bills, according to a study by energy consultants Cornwall Insight and Complete Strategy.

Their joint report showed on Tuesday that household energy suppliers in the UK could be exposed to as much as £1.9 billion ($2.4 billion) of debt, a significant portion of which could be unrecoverable.

That debt could lead to more supplier failures, with the costs then added to consumer bills, which would further exacerbate the situation with fuel poverty in the country, the report warns.

The so-called bad debt will likely only grow, with the support provided by the government’s energy price freeze package rising from £2,500 to £3,000 for an average household, according to the consultancy firms.

“There needs to be a clear path for suppliers to recover the increasing levels of bad debt they are incurring,” said Matthew Chadwick, lead research analyst at Cornwall Insight. “In practice, this means that the costs of bad debt will either need to be carried by the suppliers or by customers who are in a position to pay,” he added.

The Public Accounts Committee reported recently that nearly 30 energy providers have failed since the summer of 2021, with the costs recovered through a charge on customers’ bills. British energy regulator Ofgem’s failure to properly regulate the supplier market has reportedly cost households an estimated £2.7 billion. Moreover, supplier Bulb Energy’s collapse is expected to add around £6.5 billion in costs to struggling Britons.

 RT 15\12\22

Dave C

 Britain’s economy shrank in the three months through October, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) confirmed on Monday, reflecting concerns over a lengthy recession.

Data showed that gross domestic product (GDP) declined by 0.3% in the period when compared with the three months through July.

The decline came even as estimates showed that GDP increased by 0.5% in the month of October after a 0.6% drop in September.

Despite the rebound in October, there is still a good chance that the British economy will shrink for a second consecutive quarter in the last three months of this year, chief economic adviser to the EY Item Club Martin Beck was cited as saying by the Associated Press. Two consecutive quarters of declining output is the technical definition of a recession.

“The near-term outlook remains gloomy, as consumers continue to struggle under the weight of high inflation and with much of the impact of this year’s interest rate rises still to be realized,” Beck reportedly said.

The ONS statistics showed that output by productive industries, which range from manufacturing to mining and energy production, dipped 1.7% in the three months through October. Service industries, which account for about four-fifths of the British economy, tumbled 0.1% during that period.

Meanwhile, consumer price inflation accelerated to a 41-year high of 11.1% in October, fueled by skyrocketing costs for food and energy.

The Bank of England said last month the economy was probably already in a recession that could last until the end of 2023. The regulator has approved eight consecutive interest rate increases as it struggles to rein in spiraling inflation. That pushed the bank’s key rate to 3% from 0.1% a year ago.

“[I] doubt that the economy will grow again until early 2024, resulting in a deeper and longer recession than we envisage for all other G7 economies,” Samuel Tombs, the chief UK economist at the consultancy Pantheon Macroeconomics told the Guardian, commenting on the ONS data.

The British economy is on course to shrink 0.4% next year as inflation remains high and companies put investment on hold, the Confederation of Business Industry (CBI) warned on Monday.

According to the report, the UK has already fallen into a “short and shallow” recession that will leave business investment 9% below 2019 levels and productivity 2% below its pre-pandemic trend at the end of 2024. Persistent weak productivity and business investment “doesn’t bode well for the country’s potential to grow,” it said.

Inflation in the country, which hit a 41-year high of 11.1% in October, was forecast to average 6.7% next year and 2.9% in 2024.

The CBI expects the UK to suffer the second worst recession among major economies, after Germany.

“Britain is in stagflation – with rocketing inflation, negative growth, falling productivity and business investment,” CBI Director-General Tony Danker said. “Firms see potential growth opportunities but a lack of ‘reasons to believe’ in the face of headwinds are causing them to pause investing in 2023,” he explained.

The CBI called on the government to make Britain’s post-Brexit work visa system more flexible, end what it sees as an effective ban on constructing onshore wind turbines, and give greater tax incentives for investment.

According to the lobby group, the government’s plan needs to be built around boosting productivity and increasing labor supply as the UK is the only major advanced economy with fewer people working than before the pandemic.

“We will see a lost decade of growth if action isn’t taken. GDP is a simple multiplier of two factors: people and their productivity. But we don’t have people we need, nor the productivity,” Danker stressed.

RT 13\12\22

Dave C

 “The way things are organised is neither natural nor inevitable, but created by people. People have a wealth of skill, intelligence, creativity and wisdom. We could be devising ways of using and distributing the earth’s vast resources so that no one starves or lives in abject poverty, making socially useful things that people need — a society which is life-affirming in all its aspects” (Alice Cook and Gwyn Kirk, Greenham Women Everywhere, South End Press, 1983).

‘What they say they want is also what socialists want; and when enough of us want it we will be able to combine those two remarkable human capacities, the emotional and the rational, in order to take things into our own hands and run our own society, our own world, in the interest of all people. Only then will ’peace and life’ be possible.’

 ‘To be radical is to grasp things by the root’

From The Bird’s Eye View Column, Socialist Standard, July 2022.

 https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2022/07/birds-eye-view-to-be-radical-is-to.html

DC

UNDERSHAFT. (Arms manufacturer) “Not at all. The more destructive war becomes the more fascinating we find it. No, Mr Lomax, I am obliged to you for making the usual excuse for my trade; but I am not ashamed of it. I am not one of those men who keep their morals and their business in watertight compartments. All the spare money my trade rivals spend on hospitals, cathedrals and other receptacles for conscience money, I devote to experiments and researches in improved methods of destroying life and property. I have always done so; and I always shall. Therefore your Christmas card moralities of peace on earth and goodwill among men are of no use to me. Your Christianity, which enjoins you to resist not evil, and to turn the other cheek, would make me a bankrupt. My morality—my religion—must have a place for cannons and torpedoes in it.”

George Bernard Shaw ‘Major Barbara’

 A senior U.S. State Department official said Thursday that a massive Ukraine aid package ― which contains $4 billion in grants for allies to buy American-made military hardware ― is partly aimed at eroding Russia’s share of the global defense market.

“There is an opportunity here for us to work on helping other countries divest from Russian equipment moving forward,” Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Jessica Lewis told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2022/05/13/us-poised-to-bite-into-russias-global-defense-market-share/

13\5\22

“They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

An admirable aspiration. Let’s do it. How? Abolish War. Abolish States. Abolish Capitalism.

Dave C.

 There aint half been some lairy leaders

Shady scoundrels, stupid scumbags

There aint half been some lousy leaders

Rotten rascals, vicious villains

Are you a blockhead?

No?

Then why let yourself be led by the nose

and suppose that those who smirk and lie

and narcissism personify

know what’s best for thee and me?

A leader’s decree might suit

the cowardly petty bourgeoisie

but dialectic materialism

should teach us that

we do not bend the knee

for any Tom, Dick or Henri

calling themselves leaders

but who are really silly bleeders.

So keep your chauvinism, dogmatism,

Your elitism, extremism,

Take your fascism and totalitarianism,

And  put it you know where

For we’re for Socialism!

When O When their Waterloo?

“Ye are many -they are few!”

DC

Winston Churchill once responded to a grammatical criticism, up with it I will not put. Party members of the World Socialist Movement are constantly asking of workers, why are you content to put up with this continued oppression by the capitalist class? The current wave of strikes in the UK by groups of workers is reminiscent of 1970’s industrial relations. The United Kingdom, disunited kingdom more like, is the sixth largest economy in the world. Perhaps it’s time for an up to date version of Friedrich Engels classic, “The Condition of the Working Class in 1844.” Forget Back to the Future: we are rapidly transitioning back to Hobbes life of nasty, brutish and short.

“Soaring prices, inflation, and unemployment are pushing up deprivation levels, the New Economics Foundation says The UK is on the cusp of the greatest cost-of-living crisis in modern times, with the number of those below the poverty line rising, according to a report by the New Economics Foundation (NEF).

In a study released on Monday, the think tank said that 30 million people in Britain will be unable to afford what the public considers to be a decent standard of living by the time the current Parliament ends in 2024.

Rising prices, below-inflation increases in earnings, and projected increases in unemployment will result in 43% of households lacking the resources to put enough food on the table or buy new clothes, the report said.

According to the NEF’s calculations, by 2024, almost 90% of single parents and 50% of workers with children will fall below the minimum income standard. On average, those falling below the threshold for a decent standard of living will be short by £10,000 ($12,422) a year, the research shows.

“A decade of cuts, freezes, caps, and haphazard migration between systems left the UK with one of the weakest safety nets, both among developed countries globally, as well as in the UK’s history,” NEF economist Sam Tims wrote. “Millions of families were already living in avoidable deprivation and hardship but … the day-to-day experience of low-income families is set to become even more desperate.”

Official figures show that 22% of Britons are currently living below the poverty line because they are getting by on less than 60% of the median household income.”

RT 8\12\22

Dave C.

 Coal exporters from Australia reaped as much as $45bn in windfall gain in the 2021-22 year, with a similar bonanza likely this year.

The Australia Institute has said in a report that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent disruption to energy markets alone had delivered between $13bn and $23bn of gains to coal companies. All up, those gains totalled between $39bn and $45bn.

“This research shows it’s not just gas exporters who have been reaping the benefit of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” said Richard Denniss, executive director of the Australia Institute. “Coal companies have also been making a killing while households and businesses are slugged with surging prices for Australian energy.”

Australia’s coal exporters made windfall gain of $45bn last year, report estimates | Coal | The Guardian

The Socialist Party stands in solidarity with the striking nurses and all other working people who have felt the need to take industrial action. 

The Royal College of Nursing said its members had been given no choice after ministers refused to reopen pay talks. The RCN has to ensure life-preserving care continues during the 12-hour strike and vital urgent care such as chemotherapy and kidney dialysis along with intensive and critical care, children’s accident and emergency and hospital neonatal units, but not routine treatment as in pre-booked appointments such as hernia repair, hip replacements or outpatient clinics.

The RCN’s general secretary, Pat Cullen explained, “Nurses are not relishing this,” she said. “We are acting with a very heavy heart…Nursing staff on picket lines is a sign of failure on the part of governments.”

 Scheduled Caste or Dalit people are almost 37% of Punjab’s population but have only 3.6% of the arable land! Again, 61% of village households have less than 15% of the arable land — their land size is less than 1 hectare – they are called “Marginal Farmers” by economists and govt. 

Some of such household have such scarce land and such minimal resources they lease out their land to richer farmers — among which started first in Punjab — it is called “Reverse Tenancy” by economists. Some of such poor ‘owners’ become agricultural labourers or other rural labourers who depend more on wages than on the money they can get from ‘ownership’.

Report Of Struggle Of  Punjab’s Fight-for-Land Movement By  ZPSC And Agricultural Labourers | Countercurrents

Michigan  Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib delivered an impassioned speech in support of rail workers.

“Corporate greed is a disease in this country,” Tlaib explained during a rail worker solidarity rally. “We do live in the richest country on the planet, and no worker should have to choose between their health and a paycheck.” Tlaib said, “We cannot allow corporate greed to continue to kill workers and our families.”

The International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) president Jimmy Williams and Communications Workers of America (CWA) secretary-treasurer Sara Steffens—co-chairs of the Worker Power Coalition, a nationwide alliance of labor and environmental advocacy groups representing 24 million workers, accompanied by Democratic Reps. Jamaal Bowman, Ro Khanna, Andy Levin, Donald Norcross. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar, demanded more funding for the cash-starved National Labor Relations Board.

While the NLRB’s budget has effectively shrunk, its workload has soared. The federal agency tasked with enforcing U.S. labor law hasn’t received a funding increase in nearly a decade. The NLRB’s annual budget has been frozen at $274.2 million since 2014, which amounts to a 25% cut when inflation is taken into account.  From 2021 to 2022, the number of union representation petitions and unfair labor practice charges filed grew by 53% and 19%, respectively. Meanwhile, the number of NLRB officials who oversee union elections and investigate employer abuses has been slashed by 50% since 2002.

AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler and the presidents of more than 40 unions called on Congress to “fund the NLRB so the agency can hire staff and procure the necessary resources to conduct hearings and elections, investigate ULP charges, and obtain full and prompt remedies for workers whose rights are violated.”

“Our country is experiencing a moment of mass worker organizing—71% of Americans approve of unions and tens of millions of Americans would join a union right now if they could without retaliation or harassment,” said Williams. “But the drastic underfunding of the NLRB means that many of these workers will face delays in getting a union vote or receiving justice for illegal retaliation or termination from their employers…”

 The Economic Policy Institute  warned that “the consequences of a funding shortfall could be disastrous for workers who rely on the NLRB to fairly oversee their efforts to unionize and to hold employers accountable for violating their rights, including Amazon and Starbucks workers.”

“Big corporations and their CEOs routinely violate the law to bust unions and cling to their profits,” said Omar. “It is the NLRB that holds these billionaire CEOs accountable when they try to stand in the way of worker power.” However, the enforcers of labor law “are under threat from Republicans who want to weaken them and undermine their work,” Omar continued. “We will not stop fighting to ensure that they have the resources they need to hold these union-busters accountable and make sure everyone’s basic rights to organize and collectively bargain are protected.”

‘To Hold Billionaire CEOs Accountable,’ House Dems and Union Leaders Push for Fully Funded NLRB (commondreams.org)