Quote:
Originally Posted by ianch99
This is the actual issue for discussion: allowing the market to deliver revenue & profit from an infrastructure sector at the expense of large parts of the population.
The only good thing that will come out of this is the awareness of the level of greed & exploitation such a system delivers. The commodity traders and other players in the market literally do not care if their actions result in people going hungry and/or cold. It's all about the money. The really sad part is the number of people who will schill for these companies, players, etc. They are either are part of the system in that they directly benefit from these market changes or they are just ill informed at best, or at worse, morons.
Playing the card "but, but, they have a duty to the shareholders" is just a shallow deflection. Companies that operate in the UK, raise revenue in the UK, employ people in the UK have, at the end of the day, have a duty to the UK. In times of national extremes, they should behave accordingly. Profits should be reinvested in the company: reducing product prices, improving employee wages and investing in infrastructure.
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I agree with the sentiment, however the card "they have a duty to shareholders" is valid. It's not those actors that are flawed - they're acting entirely rationally. They've been handed licences to print money by Governments who sold off energy security to the highest bidder. That's what makes the model fundamentally flawed, and decades of conservative ideology and market liberalisation have come to just this.
Energy companies have no incentive to innovate, to reduce costs, to provide genuine competition against one another. It is more rational to restrict supply, move the risk to shell companies (and therefore back to Government), raise profit margins and enjoy supernormal profits at the expense of the gullible fools who fell for the myth that the private sector could replace public utilities.
This of course is not unique to the UK - however only state intervention can solve the problem.
The real fear the Tories have is once people realise the wool has been pulled over their eyes in the energy markets it's the tip of the iceberg.