The House of Commons voted by 310 to 248 to oppose Labour's motion to impose a windfall tax on oil and gas producers last night.
As I read it, not a single Tory broke ranks to support the idea that people should be put before exploitation by the profiteering companies that are driving inflation. Not one.
I genuinely try to find the best in people. I find life easier to manage that way. On this occasion, I am struggling. I cannot think of a single reason why anyone would rather a pensioner freeze or a family be unable to cook food because the cost of energy is too high because the profit of a multinational corporation is more important.
And please no one tell me that they need this profit because they could not otherwise invest in green programmes, because that's nonsense. Those green programmes existed and were viable before this profiteering happened. Those programmes can pass all the required hurdle interest rates to ensure rational investment at rates of return sufficient to keep shareholders happy using readily available borrowed funds. And as a matter of fact, energy companies are not making those green investments anyway: they're searching for more oil to burn to guarantee that we have no future on this planet.
So why did the Tories vote to support profit over people? The only explanation I can offer is that their ideology - based as it is on callous indifference to the fate of most people - matters more to them than real people and I can find nothing good in that.
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Do the Tories genuinely have an ideology?
The last forty years of ever increasing business monopoly, the constant need for state subsidy and feather-bedding of their rent seeking activities almost irrefutably suggests that their supposed belief in the god-like ability of competitive free markets to solve all human problems is actually no more than a smokescreen.
The real objective being to capture the government by any means possible, use that power to enrich themselves and promote their own self-interest at the expense of everybody else that lives in the UK.
Having lost the Empire that AJP Taylor described as a form of unemployment benefit for the unemployable British upper classes, they treat Britain in much the same way that their forbears treated colonial possessions.
Strip the country of its wealth and keep down the uppity natives by any means possible.
The last is an ideology
Do the Tories genuinely have an ideology?
Yes: The Devil take the hindmost.
I saw the 1936 film Things Come based on work by H G Wells. (I would point out I saw in the 1960s- as a teenager. I’m not that old!)
After order has been restored and a new world built, some of the people thought life had become too safe and argued for a more competitive world giving more opportunity for some and ‘devil take the hindmost’ for some. It was first time I had heard the term. They were the villains. Wells, of course, was not just a writer of imaginative fiction but a socialist too, and it influenced his work.
Your post reminded me that the ideology goes back a long way but, sadly, is still with us today.
Indeed
“And please no one tell me that they need this profit because they could not otherwise invest in green programmes, because that’s nonsense. ”
Let us firmly squash that canard now. BP is so loaded in free cash it is in the middle of a $1.5Bn share buyback operation. It is so overloaded with money it can’t invest in anything, it is buying its own shares. This is ithe corporate equivalent of narcissism, on steroids.
Agreed
The Tory ideology is that they hate the State and they want it out of the way so that they can profiteer from our lack of real cash, our need to move around and from our cancers (to name but a few of the things they and their mates want to exploit).
So, to do this, they employ good old Fascist techniques to divide and conquer us and to break the system so that people are presented with no alternative but to give way to more privatisation and less help.
All we are good for in their eyes is to cream a return from.
Society is just a host for these Tory rentier parasites.
We need to call in the pest exterminators – and quickly.
I think another question that should be asked is why are Labour proposing something that we already have. It just doesn’t make sense. There was a massive jump in revenues to the Treasury from petrol VAT, until the fuel duty cut at least. That extra income doesn’t exist in the minds of the people voting for the motion or at least that’s the way it seems.
Direct that windfall of taxes we already have to uprating UC.
Without their corporate and rich dividend drawing donors, the Conservative Party could not exist because they offer nothing for the common good for the majority of people to support. Even under the first past the post voting system,2ab3c4 their vote share is less than 50%. Their grip on the media may be dominant now but the cracks are now showing with the climate, living costs and war crisis rendering them completely incapable of solving these problems without affecting the profits of the corporate elites.
If the elderly, the sick and the disabled – notably from the lower soc-ec deciles – die off in greater numbers, the tory thought processes (such as they are) see that as an overall social good. Pensions, benefits, nhs and social care bills are reduced. Social housing is freed up for the next on the waiting list. What’s not to like? Any impact on overall life expectancy doesn’t affect them at all, only the ‘lower orders’, where it has been reducing significantly since ‘Austerity’ and now covid.
Con Party ideology is a miserable, misanthropic mix of Mogg’s dad’s ‘Sovereign Individual’ + Ayn Rand + Hayek, Friedman, Buchanan, Mt Pelerin Society + Thatcher’s absurd TINA + Hardin’s ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ … all to enable State Capture & oligarchy over democracy. The ‘externalities’ of this poisonous mix deliver Earth’s ecosystems existential crises & “Red Alert”.
The saying “An idea is only good when The Boss has it” fits the Cons – they see no social or ecosystems problems & so have no new ideas & therefore cannot see or accept others’ analyses or proposals (hence Alok Sharma is sidelined by Sunak, Kwarteng, Johnson – who thereby admit their climate change denier positions & sycophants of Big Oil)
There are a number of things that I find particularly troubling about where we find ourselves, politically and economically.
The first one is obvious, it doesn’t matter how odious or incompetent the Tory government is there is a very significant number of people that will still vote for them. The attitudes that give rise to this is in most of us to a certain extent but there is a cohort within the Tory loyalty group that vote for them simply because they supress or disadvantage others deliberately. Lowering of living standards does not seem to inculcate alternate views.
What I find particularly awful is that whenever the Tories finally get kicked out of Downing Street little effort is made to roll back on the damage done. For each period in power they take us 3 steps to the right, and whilst out of power we only take 1 step left. They take a long view with regard to the direction the nation is moving in, but they also don’t mind taking the short view in dismantling what the Labour governments do. Look how long it took Labour to nearly irradicate child povety and how quickly its come back again.
Some things are so long term that Labour doesn’t want to tackle them at all. Building vessels for the Royal Navy, for example, the manufacturing base has been so decimated that building it up again would take, as an estimate, 25 years. Few wish to commit money to a tree that is only going to bare fruit in a couple of decades, particularly as the MoD can only seem to budget year to year. Johnson’s pre-eminent navy has 4 submarines (non nuclear weapon carrying) in the water, Cameron slowed down the building of new vessels, leading to further losses of skills and manpower, and now at least in the short term there is nothing we can do to speed things up.
As a nation are we ever going to re-establish social housing? What about employee rights? Green energy, hamstrung with a wave of the hand and a crass remark by a stupid privately educated and privaledged man? Closed systems that reward capital and influence rather than innovation.
It is truly desperate and at times I can’t see a way out of it.
BP’s CFO recently advised investors that they manage the company as if it was $40 oil. This is the basis of their investment decisions…simply anything above $40 is a bonus. Decisions tend to be made at least 5 years in advance and against their own internal hurdle rates.
The average operating cost in the UKCS is £11.20 per boe.
There is no shortage of oil or gas – although as you suggest, we have massively reduced our strategic gas reserves.
The UK is arguably one of the regimes that taxes oil companies the least.
Simply, the oil companies are profiteering from a market driven by greed and to keep ruling Middle East families and some other governments in power. The only rush to do anything will be to boost investors’ profits via dividends, enact share buy-back schemes and allocate huge bonuses to senior executives. It will NOT increase investment in green energy…it won’t even significantly increase investment in the UKCS oil and gas projects. And, as the oil companies very carefully organise their tax arrangements, the extra profits – for which they’ve done absolutely nothing to deserve – will not result in any significant additional taxes being paid to the UK treasury. A windfall tax will not in itself address the multiple problems we face but it should be applied! Ideally, along with the arguably more impactful other suggestions you have made.
As a final observation, the recent BOE decision to raise interest rates was disgraceful and economically illiterate. They should be ashamed of themselves.
Much to agree with
Tories have surpassed ideology, it is a religion.. a cult.
Sajid Javid performs ritual twice a year, he reads the courtroom scene in The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.
Rand, author of “The Virtue of Selfishness”, is worshipped by many Tories.
Sadly, for those of us who value empathy and the quality of life of others, her debased output has morphed and merged into a contagion a dark web of malformed doctrines.. including other debunked nonsense like austerity, excessive use of game theory, self-mending free markets and neoliberalism. It’s a memeplex that feeds and poisons the minds of many.
It’s a cult, and a contagion.