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U.K. Energy Price Cap to Rise 80%, Regulator Says

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Energy prices paid by most British households are set to rise 80 percent this fall, putting further pressure on consumers squeezed by higher prices and posing a daunting challenge for the next prime minister.

A big jump in energy bills had been forecast for weeks, but the specific numbers released Friday morning by Britain’s energy regulator — a typical British household would pay 3,549 pounds (about $4,200) over a year for electricity and natural gas, from the current £1,971 — hit like a thunderclap in a country already reeling from double-digit inflation.

It is the latest economic blow to European consumers and businesses as the war in Ukraine stretches already tight markets for energy.

54 percent rise in April.

The news of the price increases came during a moment of deep political drift in Britain, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson preparing to leave office and his Conservative Party preoccupied by a contest to replace him. Mr. Johnson has left it for his successor to craft a response to the skyrocketing energy costs.

The front-runner to replace Mr. Johnson, Liz Truss, has promised targeted aid to help those hardest hit by higher bills, though she has steadfastly refused to detail her plans. She and her opponent, Rishi Sunak, both reject more sweeping measures, like using state subsidies to freeze the energy price cap for two years.

Consumer prices in Britain rose 10.1 percent last month from a year earlier, the fastest pace in 40 years, squeezing household budgets. The Bank of England has predicted that inflation would peak at 13 percent in October as the new energy prices turn up in household bills. Other estimates are higher; analysts at Citi have said the rate could reach as high as 18 percent next year.

“The pressure on stretched households will only intensify, and the calls for support will get ever louder,” wrote Martin Young, a utility analyst at Investec, a financial services firm, in a recent note to clients. Mr. Young expects another jump, to £4,210, in January.

The price hikes and how to deal with them have become a hot subject of political discourse in Britain and across Europe. While the British government has offered a package that includes £400 per household to help residents with soaring bills, a wide range of politicians, consumer advocates and energy executives now say that more forceful intervention is needed to cushion households from the surge in energy costs.

Recently, Britain’s opposition Labour Party said that it would freeze energy tariffs where they are now, paying part of the £29 billion cost by increasing the so-called windfall taxes that the Conservative government imposed earlier this year on oil and gas giants operating in the North Sea.

The main component in Ofgem’s calculations was a more than doubling of wholesale electricity and natural gas costs. These account for about 70 percent of the new price cap.

Coping with increases of such magnitude is beyond the scope of Ofgem, whose role is to protect consumers from profiteering by suppliers, Mr. Brearley said. “The truth is this is beyond the capacity of the industry and the regulator to address,” he added.

Looking to the race for the next prime minister, Mr. Brearley called on the winning candidate to intervene decisively in the energy markets.

“What I am clear about is the prime minister with his or her ministerial team will need to act urgently and decisively to address this,” he said. “The outlook for the winter without any action looks very difficult indeed.”

The leadership contest has been dominated by Ms. Truss’s promise to cut taxes, which is popular with the rank-and-file Conservative Party members who will vote for the next prime minister. But economists say it will do little to protect the most vulnerable people from the ravages of soaring energy bills.

With another hefty price increase looming in October, the public outcry over energy costs is likely to haunt the next prime minister. Unless the government develops an effective response, some analysts said, the issue could cripple the government and tilt the next election to the Labour Party.

The peculiar nature of Britain’s price cap system, analysts said, also amplifies the sticker shock from rising increases.

“We have a sort of worst-of-both-worlds system,” said Jonathan Portes, a professor of a professor of economics and public policy at Kings College London. “Household prices are related to the spot market, and we sort of save up price increases and dump them on households all at once.”

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Amazon Workers At U.K. Warehouse Stop Work To Protest Pay

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By Associated Press
August 4, 2022

Amazon offered a raise of 42 cents an hour but workers in England are demanding an increase of $2.43 an hour.

More than 700 Amazon warehouse workers in England staged a protest Thursday in a dispute over pay, in the latest sign of workplace friction stoked by Britain’s cost of living crisis and a growing discontent among employees over wage and working conditions.

The GMB union said employees at the facility in Tilbury, Essex, east of London, stopped work after the ecommerce giant offered to raise salaries by 42 cents an hour.

The union said workers want a raise of $2.43 to better match the demands of their job and cope with soaring inflation. Amazon doesn’t recognize the union, which likely has one of the highest number of members at the Tilbury location out of its 28 U.K. facilities.

“Amazon is one of the most profitable companies on the planet,” said Steve Garelick, the GMB union’s regional organizer for logistics and gig economy. “With household costs spiraling, the least they can do is offer decent pay.” 

Garelick shared videos on Twitter of workers sitting down at tables, which he said showed a “withdrawal of labour” at the Tilbury warehouse.

He said Amazon’s “repeated use of short-term contracts is designed to undermine workers’ rights.”

Amazon said U.K. warehouse employee salaries will rise to between $12.78 and $13.93 an hour, which it called “competitive pay.” But its dependent on location.

As well, the company said employees get a comprehensive benefits package that includes private medical insurance, life insurance, subsidized meals, and employee discounts that are “worth thousands annually,” as well as a company pension plan.

Similar protests have been staged in the U.S., including in March, when more than 60 workers in New York and Maryland walked out on the job to call for a $3 raise and a return to 20-minute breaks the company put in place during the pandemic.

Amazon boosted its average hourly wage to $18 an hour last year.

The Amazon Labor Union, a nascent group composed of former and current Amazon workers, won its union election on Staten Island, New York partly on a platform of raising wages to $30 an hour. But getting anywhere close to that is bound to be a tough fight. Amazon has been seeking to scrap the union’s April victory and is petitioning the National Labor Relations Board for a new election.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

: newsy.com

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U.K. Lawmakers Select 2 Final Candidates To Replace PM Boris Johnson

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By Luke Hanrahan
July 21, 2022

Prime Minister Boris Johnson will remain in office until lawmakers vote and decide on either Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss as the new leader.

Members of Parliament have selected the final two candidates in the contest to become the U.K.’s next prime minister.

Rishi Sunak, the man in charge of the country’s finances during the pandemic, was an analyst at Goldman Sachs before government.

His Achilles heel is his family’s fortune and his wealthy wife’s controversial tax record.  

If Sunak is successful, he will become the country’s first prime minister of South Asian descent.  

“The question now for our members is, ‘Who is the best person to defeat Keir Starmer and the Labour Party at the next election?’ I believe I’m the only candidate who can do that,” Sunak said. 

The second final candidate is Liz Truss, who is the country’s current foreign secretary. Before becoming a politician, she was a successful accountant. Her Achilles heel is the fact that she was once a member of another political party — the Liberal Democrats — and, a leading campaigner to keep Britain in the European Union.

“What’s important is that we hit the ground running,” Truss said. “We’ve got two years until a likely next general election. And I want to deliver for people. I want to deliver lower taxes. I want to help struggling families.”

Both candidates have argued for extreme tax cuts. Truss’ proposed cuts would go furthest, and arrive faster — a move which appeals to core Conservative voters.

Sunak has countered by claiming his government will follow the mold of Margaret Thatcher’s, perhaps the most notorious Tory tax-cutting prime minister the country has ever seen.  

Sunak may have been the most popular with MPs, but the challenge now is to win over the Conservative Party’s roughly 160,000 members. Half of that number are over 60, and 97% of them are white and live in southern England. Among members, Truss is the favorite to win, and they now decide who will be Britain’s next prime minister.  

In Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s final appearance in Parliament, he paid tribute to himself. He will remain in office until the new leader is selected in early September.

: newsy.com

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Fallen British Empire Soldiers Overlooked Because of Racism, Inquiry Finds

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LONDON — Tens of thousands of soldiers from Africa and Asia who died during World War I in the service of what was then the British Empire were not properly commemorated, partly because of prejudice and racism, according to the findings of an inquiry issued on Thursday.

The report, written by an independent committee, found that the graves of 45,000 to 54,000 people who died serving the British war effort — largely East Africans, West Africans, Egyptians and Indians — did not receive appropriate memorials. At least 116,000 other casualties were not named on any memorials, the report said, adding that the number could be as high as 350,000.

First reported by The Guardian newspaper on Wednesday, the inquiry found that, though some colonial subjects had volunteered their service, “an equally high proportion may have been coerced or forcibly conscripted by the military and colonial authorities,” especially in African colonies and in Egypt.

Those who died, in some cases, were commemorated collectively on memorials rather than with their own individual headstones or grave markers, like their European counterparts were. In other cases, soldiers who were missing had their names recorded in registers rather than in stone.

erupted across the country last summer. Critics have said that a government-commissioned report on racial discrimination, released last month in response to those protests, whitewashed racial injustice in Britain after it said that disparities were more because of reasons of socio-economic status than of race.

Statues of slave traders have been torn down in some cities in Britain, and museums in the country have been working to highlight links to slavery and colonialism in their exhibits. The royal family has also come under fire after Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, said in an interview last month that a member of the family had asked questions about the skin color of their son, who was then not yet born.

“Unremembered — Britain’s Forgotten War Heroes,” which followed the British Labour lawmaker David Lammy as he investigated why African soldiers who served and died during World War I had not received their own graves.

said on Twitter in response to the inquiry. But recognition that the commission had failed to treat Black African and other ethnic minority soldiers the same as others was a “watershed moment,” he said, adding that it offered an opportunity to work through “this ugly part of our history.”

The report said the failure of the commemoration efforts was underpinned by “entrenched prejudices, preconceptions and pervasive racism of contemporary imperial attitudes.”

Responding to the findings, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission apologized for “historic failings” and said that it was fully committed to delivering on a series of recommendations made in the report. Those included providing more resources to search for those not commemorated and collaborating with local communities to highlight difficult parts of the British Empire’s history.

“The events of a century ago were wrong then and are wrong now,” Claire Horton, the commission’s director general, said in a statement. “We are sorry for what happened and will act to right the wrongs of the past.”

The British defense secretary, Ben Wallace, apologized on behalf of the government on Thursday. “There can be no doubt that prejudice played a part in some of the commissioners’ decisions,” he said in Parliament. He said that the government would support the implementation of the report’s recommendations. “Whilst we can’t change the past, we can make amends and take action,” he said.

But Kehinde Andrews, professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University, said “It’s really farcical that in the 21st century, now, they want to apologize.”

The commission was created in 1917 to commemorate the deaths of service members in cemeteries and memorials across the world. Among the group’s main principles is “equality of treatment for the war dead irrespective of rank or religion.” At least 1.7 million British Empire and Commonwealth citizens died during the two World Wars.

In World War I, the contributions of soldiers from “white-settled” countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand dominated the narrative over other parts of the British Empire, the report said.

Many Britons were unaware that nonwhite colonial subjects were involved in the empire’s wars, and that was because of gaps in the history that is taught in schools, Professor Andrews said. “If government institutions were serious, you have to fundamentally rebuild the school curriculum from scratch,” he added.

The forced conscription of colonial subjects, he said, should open a conversation about restitution and reparations for the families of those affected.

“This was 100 years ago,” he said, adding that the current accounting of past wrongs was “too little, too late.”

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