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Thursday, July 31, 2008

It's a Gas: Ripping off the Public in Privatised Britain


The Daily Mail reports:

The parent company of British Gas today announced profits of £992m - just one day after customers were hit with a staggering 35 per cent rise in the cost of gas.

The astonishing thing about this news is that some people find it astonishing. Centrica, the parent company of British Gas, is a plc, and as such its first priority is not to the long-suffering British public struggling to make ends meet, but to make as much profit as possible for its shareholders. That's what plcs do.

Our anger should be directed not so much at Centrica, but our bovine political class who privatised our utilities in the first place, and who still reject the one step that would end the profiteering: taking our utilities back into public ownership.

3 comments:

Tommy Schmitz said...

Bovine. Yes, a wonderful adjective of relation to describe the ruling class.

And for future fun and reference here are several more that are also appropriate:

buteonine (like buzzards)
blattoid (like cockroaches)
limacine (like slugs)
ixiodic (like ticks)
suidian (like pigs)
suilline (like hogs)

or perhaps my personal favorite:
blennoid (like mucus)

:)

- tommy schmitz, iowa

Anonymous said...

another demonstration of the problems with privatisation(or profitisation) is with QANTAS, which from being famouse as one of the best and safest airlines in the world, has gone in a short space of time, since its profitisation, to being disaster prone:

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/world/view/20080725-150732/Qantas-safety-record


Brian

neil craig said...

Perhaps also for the Luddite political class which has spent decades preventing the building of the nuclear power stations that produce 80% of France's power at 1.3p a unit.

The correlation between enrgy & GNP is well established & the british economy is running on 1 cylinder because the politicos would rather let quiet pensioners freeze than annoy noisy "environmentalists".