MONEY-SAVING expert journo Martin Lewis has become a consumer champion who holds a dagger of truth to ministers.
His sharp analysis and the well-grounded research he provides has made him the nemesis of an Establishment — in both media and government — that seeks to obscure the causes of the present economic crisis.
He argues that the energy crisis should be treated with the same urgency as the pandemic and in doing so he sets up a series of warning lights in the minds of every elector.
The way the government tackled the coronavirus crisis is a textbook example of a capitalist cock-up.
It had to be forced by argument and popular pressure into taking bold action. This included massive subventions from public funds in income support for both people and enterprises. If this went against Rishi Sunak's trademark austerian instincts, it did not stop his family harvesting substantial harvest subsidies.
Or him claiming — in the grotesque farce that is the Tory leadership contest — this as a success.
Memorably, the government spaffed uncounted mountains of money up the wall in failed track-and-trace operations and dodgy procurement deals.
With the government set to hold emergency talks with the energy corporations, this is the time to learn the lessons of the coronavirus crisis.
First, do not trust the private sector to deliver. Sure, direct cash support to consumers mitigates the effect of unjustified and extortionate energy price rises.
But it is a conduit for public cash to flow directly to the price-gouging energy companies and boost their already exorbitant profits.
Second, ministers have options. They could take a leaf out of The Godfather and make the energy companies an offer they cannot refuse — take a hit on present and historic profits and cut fuel costs. Or better, beat it.
No shareholder or corporate bigwig should profit from this crisis, and the energy companies should be conscripted to serve the national interest.
Putting these corporate entities into public ownership completes a perfect circle of fiscal responsibility and would close off the opportunity for profiteering that every crisis of capitalism seems to spawn.
One distinctive feature of the government’s conduct in the coronavirus crisis was the way in which it managed to ignore or subvert the advice it was receiving from its own expert policy advisers.
Not the gormless special advisers who bring to policy formations a slag heap of reactionary think-tank ideology and a desert of practical experience — but the medical and public health professionals who serve the public interest. And, indeed, the parallel group of Sage specialists upon who the public came to rely even more.
The simple fact that nevertheless has yet to dawn on Liz Truss is that many people, even most people, cannot afford to pay the kind of prices that energy companies can impose under this government’s sky-high energy price cap.
By autumn anyone who pays the energy bills by direct debit will be subject to a corporate raid on their bank account that will leave them with nothing substantial to pay mortgages, rent, food bills or clothe and shoe their children.
It is not a question of “won’t pay” but of “can’t pay.”
Any politician who fails to understand this brutal fact or thinks there is a policy fudge that can take the sting out of public fury — or which leaves the present architecture of energy provision as it is — will face a tsunami of opposition.
Or, in the case of our official parliamentary opposition — a shrug of indifference that will make even the present tepid support for Keir Starmer seem like a standing ovation.
