Pendle Labour Party Blog

Some of us will remember Margaret Thatcher’s British Gas sell off campaign in 1986.
To try and ‘include’ us working class oiks in buying shares in a company we already collectively owned, the Conservative government ran a successful campaign using the slogan, "If you see Sid...Tell him!"
What they didn’t tell Sid (and the rest of us) was that 25 years later many of us would be living in fuel poverty relying on Russia and the Near East for our domestic fuel. They didn’t tell us that our utilities would be owned by French and German companies. Nor did they tell us that each household would be paying the energy companies £125 in profit this year.

David Cameron and Chris Huhne entertained us last week with a Canute like performance and withdrew as soon as the tide turned ugly.

I understand that they cannot do anything directly about dwindling stocks of oil & gas nor can they do anything about world wide rising demand. But they can tackle high profits and stop the energy companies operating cartels.

They can also look to developing ‘clean coal technology’ and getting off their respective ‘widest bits’ to promote renewable energy.

We have seen a substantial hike in the number of people out of work in East Lancashire and unfortunately more will follow as a direct result of the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Austerity Plan.
It is desperately sad that this winter many households in Pendle will be faced with the choice of turning the heating on to try to keep warm or putting food on the table. Whilst high paid company executives and bankers feast on their excessive bonuses and speculators gorge on their excessive accumulations of wealth.

This reminds me of an article I recently read, written by an old acquaintance, Roy Jones.

Roy wrote:
“In the Great Depression of the 1930s a spate of media articles advised the unemployed on how to survive on the pittance allowed them - the irony of which was most famously highlighted by Communist MP Willie Gallacher who, when the poor were told how to make soup from fish heads, wondered: "What happened to the rest of the fish?"