The basic demand is right!
The core demand of today's fuel protest across the North is right and massively popular: urgent action on skyrocketing fuel prices during a cost-of-living crisis that’s crushing ordinary people.
It’s abundantly clear that ordinary people feel utterly left behind by an Executive that has presided over years of rising costs with no real answers.
Fuel is only part of it: rents and mortgages are unaffordable, food prices keep climbing, benefits have stagnated and wages have been cut in real terms.
Working class communities are being hammered from every direction, and people have had enough.
The numbers are stark
The Executive parties here have a case to answer for the stagnant wages, poor quality homes and unchecked profiteering of energy companies, which have compounded the hardships facing families across the North.
Keir Starmer’s listless Labour government allocated the Executive a paltry £17 million to help with soaring energy costs. A month later, people have yet to see a single penny of this support.
Over 40% of people here are living in fuel poverty. 27% of households went without heating or electricity in the past two years because they couldn’t afford the bills. 1 in 4 children in West Belfast and in Derry are living in poverty.
The far-right seek to cynically hijack people’s justified anger for their own ends. Profiteers and warmongerers are responsible for this crisis - not trans people, migrants or any other oppressed group that political grifters attempt to scapegoat.
Blame the government
The Executive's de facto response is to beg the British government for more support that clearly isn't coming. Britain is a lapdog for US empire, and spineless Starmer clearly has no intention of standing up to Trump.
People are told to be grateful for scraps while costs keep rising. In many working class communities, fuel protests are popular for exactly that reason.
The state’s response to this outcry has been an authoritarian clampdown on the right to protest, with the PSNI issuing protestors with fixed penalty notices for road traffic offences and cautions for public order offences.
Repressive powers used here have been and will be used again: against workers taking industrial action, against housing movements, against Palestine solidarity protesters, against anyone who seriously challenges the interests this government protects.
A bigger movement is needed
This crisis also exposes something deeper.
The illegal war of aggression on Iran has highlighted the instability and unsustainability of our reliance on fossil fuels. Fossil fuel dependence leaves workers exposed every time there is a global shock. Our economy must be transformed away from extractavism and towards democratic ownership of our energy system.
What's needed now is a wider fightback, with workers and trade unions at its core - against fuel poverty, climate breakdown, unaffordable housing, exploitative landlords and an Executive that rewards big business at the expense of working class families.
People Before Profit is committed to building that movement.
People Before Profit’s Demands:
- Immediate price caps on fuel and energy - this is clearly a matter for the British government, but the Executive needs to recognise the clear link between fuel poverty and corporate profiteering, and push Starmer’s government to do something about it.
- Windfall taxes on energy companies’ record profits
- Greater powers for the Utility Regulator to investigate the pricing of local energy providers
- £500 energy credit for all households, with additional support for disabled people and those on social security
- Ramp up retrofitting to reduce energy costs
- Free public transport
- End sweetheart electricity deals for data centres - make them pay household rates
- Ban the construction of new data centres
- US military out of Irish airports and skies