Yesterday, Rushi Sunak said that he’d consider a windfall tax on energy company profits, even though he’s not ‘naturally attracted’ to the idea. Last week Boris Johnson said he might think about such a tax if companies refused to invest to boost energy security. The opposition parties are pushing for such a tax. The idea of a windfall tax on the profits on major energy producers seems popular.
Image caption: Picture of Rushi Sunak below the headline: Sunak threatens energy firms with windfall tax.
It might be confusing to many people that the government are hesitant to regulate and intervene politically in big energy firms. Such an intervention could comfortably align with their own ideologies, such as investment in energy security and infrastructure, especially because of fears about gas supply stemming from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Surely there would be no better time for a government - even one that usually favours market forces - to get away with a bit of state intervention, to temporarily tax the profits of energy extraction and in turn solve a cost of living crises that threatens their future election chances?
The early gas companies and their ‘dodgy geezers.’ 1
We need to go back in time to understand this reluctance. In the early 1800s, when The Chartered Gas Light and Coke Company brought the first gas lights to the people of London, coal gas was a chaotic business. The original gas companies were ‘crookedly and incompetently run,’ and the consumers ‘avoided paying for their gas,’ 2 and Mary Mills who brings the first London gas companies to life so vividly in her research on the East London gas industry, says it was riddled with ‘fraud and incompetence’ and ‘dodgy geezers.’ 3
Workers refused to light the new gas lamps on Westminster Bridge forcing the engineer Samual Clegg to do it himself. 4 Frederick Winsor, often credited with the first public gas lighting, was known as a charlatan and a maverick, printing his own political pamphlets against would-be competitors, who in turn exaggerated the safety fears of gas to undermine him. And if you think Insulate Britain stopping the flow of traffic is bad, in 1858 The Usk Gleaner and Monmouthshire Record reported that a mob tore up the newly laid gas pipes in the town because of tension between rival companies.
This was all mostly happening against a political backdrop of laissez-faire politics and a desire to allow the market to iron out any problems. During a parliamentary discussion on water supply in 1828, Sir Robert Peel prophetically exclaimed:
‘If they, (the government) interfered in procuring a supply of water, why not in procuring a supply of gas, or in lighting, watching and paving the streets? Nay, more, if such interference took place with respect to the metropolis (London) what was to prevent Liverpool, Manchester, Edinburgh and the other great towns from making a similar application ?’ 5
Peel’s horror at the spread of government interference echos Rushi Sunak’s ‘natural’ aversion to government intervention.
Coal gas, however, left a legacy of polluting waste products that found their way into the river water where people fished and the air people breathed. It required construction of huge gasholders to supply the rapidly expanding urban populations. Middle class residents complained that their brasses turned black within a day because of the coal gas works, and of ‘disagreeable smells’ that grew worse during the ‘drawing down of the retorts.’ They worried that gas works in their area would attract an undesirable type of resident - i.e. workers! 6 Gradually, pollution, pricing, consumer demand and supply, forced a reluctant government to contain and regulate aspects of the growing gas industry with a series of parliamentary acts and increasing levels of monitoring and inspection.
Image caption: A picture of labourers drawing the retorts at the Great Gas Establishment Brick Lane, from The Monthly Magazine (1821)
Power has always been a key word when it comes to the gas supply and distribution. There’s the tension between power of businesses and government - national and local: in Robert Tressell’s ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’, 7 there is a whole chapter dedicated to the corruption of the local councillors and the municipal gasworks in fictional Mugsborough. There is the literal power of gas and how to safely pipe and supply it to households across the country. There have been periods of powerful state intervention during nationalisation and the switch to natural gas. For a time power was with labourers in the gas works: in the 1880s gas workers had their eight hour day demands met instantly at the the mere threat of country-wide industrial action by the stokers and retort workers.
Who will force the hand of gas companies now? A government reluctant to intervene? The public, astonished at energy company profits, but dependant on their supply? Workers, sensing looming energy transitions? Environmentalists protesting about climate change? Anti poverty campaigners and socialists insistent on redistribution of wealth and profit? Maybe global instability that could threaten future gas supply? The technology of gas has evolved in ways unimaginable to the early gas pioneers. The politics, however, sometimes remains stubbornly familiar.
This blog piece is an edited extract from my PhD: Gas, pollution and Heritage: Coal Gas and its Communities Between 1792-1981.
Derek Matthews. The London Gasworks: A technical, commercial and labour history to 1914. (1983)
Mary Mills. The early east London gas industry. (2021)
Derek Matthews. The London Gasworks: A technical, commercial and labour history to 1914. (1983)
Daniel E. Lipschutz. The water question in London. 1827-183, 521.
Daniel Ellis. Considerations Relative to Nuisance in Coal-Gas Works. (1828)
Robert Tressell. The ragged trousered philanthropists. BoD–Books on Demand, 2018.
In what the late Saddam Hussein once dubbed “the great Satan,” roughly two-thirds of the United States enlisted military corps is white . . . The fat, bulbous U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin once confirmed in a 93-2 vote of the U.S. Senate, immediately embarked on a whirlwind media tour of duty, telling the pseudo-secular sycophants in the state-controlled tabloid press and state-controlled television talk show circuit about how the U.S. Army is full of bad racist white men.
Senior Defense Department leaders celebrating yet another Pride Month at the Pentagon sounding the alarm about the rising number of state laws they say target the LGBTQ+ community, warned the trend is hurting the feelings of the armed forces . . . “LGBTQ plus and other diverse communities are under attack, just because they are different. Hate for hate’s sake,” said Gil Cisneros, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for personnel and readiness, who also serves as DoD’s chief diversity and inclusion officer.
And now the U.S. Army is doing ads begging for more young white males? What happened?
Even with a full-on declaration of war from Congress, and even if Gavin Newsome could be cheated into the Oval Office by ZOG somehow, with Globohomo diversity brigades going door-to-door looking to impress American children into military service, they will be met with armed, well-trained opposition, the invasion at the Southern border is going full tilt, and the drugs are flowing in like never before.
Get ready for it . . . the fat old devil worshipping fags on Capitol Hill, on Wall Street, in Whitehall, and in Brussels are in no shape to fight a war themselves, and most Americans are armed to the teeth with their own guns . . . NATO hates heterosexual white men . . . they said so themselves . . .
https://cwspangle.substack.com/i/138320669/nato-an-anti-white-and-anti-family-institution