windfall

to put it politely gordon brown is fucked (please excuse the use of the highly technical psephologist term). well actually he is not just fucked he is right royally fucked.
even worse for gordon is that the laws of physics do not apply to him. in the real world shit flows downwards, yet for gordon it flows from the bottom upwards.

he is attacked and blamed from all sides, from allies and enemies alike.

you only have to look at the increasing cost of fuel. to read the press it is gordon brown’s fault that the fuel companies are making outrageous profits while also putting up the price of fuel (“oh pity us”, they cry, “our costs have gone up and we can’t make huge profits anymore, oh we can if we just put our prices up”).
brown made them put the prices up.
it is brown’s fault that the price of oil has gone up. the increased demand from china and india. not really a factor in this. the madness of hedging the price of fuel has had nothing to do with it. the unwillingness to increase the supply of oil has had no bearing on the increased.
brown has just increased the price of oil on a whim.

but there are times when he is the architect of his own problems. there has been talk of a windfall tax and a £100 rebate to those in need. the story is allowed to float about in the news for a few days building up expectation and then brown says no, it is not happening, was never going to happen, well maybe it was never going to happen, not really sure, if we are going to be honest. i think. possibly. (what makes the situation worse is that we can all remember when it all went tits up (another psephologist term) for brown when he let the talk of an early election to drift about before squashing it when it became apparent that he had lost the confidence of the electorate. you would have thought once bitten twice shy, but nope).

yet if we are honest we all know that a windfall tax or a rebate to the needy is never going to be enough.
thanks to thatcher we sold off our utilities to private companies. there was a lot of talk about competition, efficiency, cheaper prices and a land of milk and honey. like so much that thatcher promised it was a lie.
so what we have are large companies who know that they can screw the punter, because there is no competition, that they only have to worry about efficiencies when they are forced into it.
even worse foreign companies own several of the companies.

see that is how the free market works.

and that really brings me to the point of this.
the only way out of this for gordon brown is for him to pull up his socks, roll up his sleeves, grit his teeth, spit in the eye of the cbi and do what he knows is right and nationalise the utilities. bring them all back into public ownership.

do that gordon and not only have you solved the current issue of prices, but you will be seen as a hero by so many in the country that you will be elected again.

gordon: you know i am right.