The Gas Link Fix Has Been Law for Years. So Why the Wait?

The government of Boris Johnson saw it – at the height of the energy crisis, global gas prices rose ten fold and dragged all other forms of electricity production with it, including the wind and sun. Johnson described it as “utterly ridiculous”. Jacob Rees-Mogg vowed to take action.

They moved fast and within weeks passed a law giving themselves emergency powers – to solve this problem, in their own words, ‘to break the link’. But they didn’t do it.

They threw £50bn of public money at energy bills to reduce them and imposed a windfall tax on green generators – both necessary but both merely addressed the symptoms not the cause.

Labour have yet to do anything. I hear they have been told by civil servants that it will be too difficult – even if that were true, it’s a terrible reason not to fix something, especially something as damaging as this link is to our national interest.

But it’s not too difficult, we’ve published a road map showing exactly how to do it. Unfortunately, but understandably, the process for making changes in the energy industry is very slow – and this one will take two years. Not the end of the world but not ideal. However, that Conservative law may still be in effect and may be sufficient. If not then Labour could pass its own emergency law – and either way get the job done much quicker.

The link is senseless – it’s not even good capitalism. To pay more for something than you need to is more often associated with state run ventures, not capitalist ones. This price fixing at the heart of our market enriches a few large companies at the expense of the entire nation. They probably think it is ‘good capitalism’.

We can’t just sit and wait till 2030 (the current plan of DESNZ) and hope an abundance of green energy will do the job.

It’s an injustice perpetrated on millions of people, struggling with energy bills, struggling to pay mortgages or rent, struggling with the cost of living, and on millions of businesses struggling to be cost competitive.

At the heart of our energy system and all other global commodity markets is a fundamental problem – where prices are not set based on the cost of production plus a margin, but driven by speculators, traders and market sentiment, manipulated by cartels. We can break our link to that.