Starmer's GB Energy con could see your bills soar.

Right, so GB Energy, the new flagship policy of Keir Starmer’s election campaign after he binned the last one, needs talking about, it needs scrutiny, because as ever when it comes to Keir Starmer, you should be looking for the con, looking for the fast one being pulled, and when even his own ministers are struggling to explain exactly how it works, you ought to have guessed by now that we’re being had.
This plan is being sold as a nationalised energy generator, investing solely in Green Energy, ostensibly you might think it’s the route to cheaper bills finally after being scalped by the Big 6 and whoever else has survived the last year and a half or so, so many energy companies going under, but it is nothing of the sort, it is pure Thatcherism 101 and therefore instead of reducing bills, it could actually see them soar, protecting the profits of the established privatised energy companies, instead of us.
Right, so trickle down economics, the excuse Margaret Thatcher used for selling off the nations family silver back in the 80’s is back on the table, presumably Rachel Reeves found some in a dusty corner of the nations economic dining room, that she’d missed and being an advocate of Tory economics, such as she is, is busy concocting some kind of national con, in order to get it flogged off and into the pockets of private investors, such is the now flagship Labour Party policy of GB Energy, a con right down to it’s logo, which as it happens, the party have apparently just bought off a stock photo website for 57 pence if they took a subscription out on it, I know the Tories are saying they spent £35 quid on it and it basically looks like a light bulb that is farting, a wonderful analogy, since this policy actually stinks.
It had been sold to us, as one of Starmer’s 6 steps, announced as part of his umpteenth relaunch of himself basically, as a new nationalised clean energy company that will decarbonise our energy industry by 2030 and cut our bills by £300 a year and a lot of people, I daresay still on the face of it, since nobody has really explained how this thing will actually work properly, believe that to be the case. Well when it was first floated that was indeed what people thought, a new energy supplier possibly, competition to force the other energy companies to cut their exorbitant profits or go out of business. That would be the socialist way to do it wouldn’t it? But then it was never meant to be a supplier we discovered, just a generator and distributor of green energy, selling green energy more cheaply to the established, privatised energy suppliers, to then pass on those savings to we the consumers, they absolutely won’t pocket those savings as profits and dividends for their shareholders, absolutely not at all, they’d never seek to profit out of us unnecessarily and unfairly would they? Oh yeah, they already did that though didn’t they?
Trickle down economics and this is Labour’s best offer to us apparently. Except, this isn’t even it either, it is literally even worse than this. How about we let Keir Starmer explain what it is himself:
So it’s an investment vehicle, not an energy company, investing in the energy of the future, using public money to get it going and then used to trigger private investment further on. His words. So it’s not nationalised, it’s attracting private investment, so it too will be privatised and it isn’t even an energy company, it’s an investment device in green energy. So any green technology that will be developed and will be producing energy, is going to be owned by privatised energy companies then, not us at all. A big fat Starmer con. If you smelt a rat around this policy, it’s a big one and it’s called Keir Starmer.
Now his uncharacteristic honesty about he policy, presumably because he is such a poor public speaker and interviewee, meant he couldn’t bulls**t his way out of it, did send Labour HQ into a bit of a flap here. It gave the Scottish Greens as a for instance ammo to say it was yet another Starmer U-turn, Starmer having launched this policy in Scotland, or relaunched it as it were, since we’ve already known about this idea since 2022. It is also literally the only economic development policy Starmer’s Labour has for Scotland, the plan being to headquarter it there, showing how much Labour give a damn about Scotland. For Labour HQ though, they didn’t see him telling the truth for a change coming any more than many of us ever would, so then a statement came out from them, part of which reads:
‘Labour has since confirmed that, although it will not be an energy retail company, it will generate power in its own right, as well as owning, managing and operating clean power projects alongside private firms.’
Right, so now we’re getting somewhere. This is a PFI scheme then.
PFI’s or Public Finance Initiatives, are funding vehicles designed to attract private investment, whereby governments sink public money into something, to attract private investment, but of course the moment you attract private investment, it becomes all about profit and returns for shareholders, rather than the service itself. Where we have seen our sevices ruined by privatisation, energy notably since we’re talking about it, PFI’s are basically privatising a nationalised project at the point of inception and although a Tory invention under John Major, they are most associated with the government of Tony Blair, who used such projects within the NHS, effectively acting as loans for the NHS since it already existed, but because it is profit driven, and because introducing more privatisation into the service, meant more NHS funding was siphoned off by these PFI’s, it had the effect, whilst injecting investment into the service, early, loading debt onto the service that they struggled to pay, resulting in cuts and sell offs to a service that should never, ever have had to do any such thing, should never have had this done to it. It gave the government of the day the public face of succeeding in providing improved care at point of service, but behind the scenes, it had just effectively moved debt off the government books and onto those of the NHS.
In the case of GB Energy, it’ll be publicly owned on the face of it, Starmer and Co will own their farting lightbulb logo, unless they’re renting it, even funnier to think about really, but everything happening behind the scenes will be privately owned. What restrictions will be placed on the energy companies to be permitted to be investors? Any? Well Labour want to decarbonise by 2030, so you’d imagine they’d have to be more inclined to move away from oil and gas to do so. Perhaps they won’t be, perhaps they like things as they are, perhaps GB Energy then, will fall flat on it’s face because the private investment doesn’t come. How would Labour sweeten the deal? We can’t invest in this, there’s no money in it, the energy companies would say. Green energy research and development, by being far cleaner, far more reliable, the wind will blow, the tides will ebb and flow, the earth will always be warmer the deeper you go, the sun will always shine, but oil and gas are finite. It means it’s cheaper and when everything is profit driven, unless those same profits or higher can be incentivised through investment in this green energy projects. It would cost these energy companies arguably less themselves to go green, but they aren’t going to take a profit cut. They might initially, but it won’t last because because investors always want more. Our bills will still be artificially higher, to maintain profit margins. All the expense of this will be off the government books, as is typical of PFI’s, but any debt that builds up as we’ve seen in the NHS, will be passed onto us through our bills. The profit margins must be maintained, must grow, plus the return on the initial investments must be clawed back too. GB Energy therefore could actually see our bills rise and actually this is entirely likely, because we’re only being promised a £300 annual saving, but not being told when we’ll start seeing it and we’ll have the cost of the energy companies investing in green energy projects passed onto us through our bills, whilst still paying for energy generated via oil and gas and that would be despite the cost of generating energy via solar and wind for example actually having come down recently.
There’s another big reason for why we could expect this plan of Labour’s to fail utterly as well and that is purely the nature of how the energy markets work.
Initial costs to start up generating green energy, will come down and gradually become more efficient as they settle in, that’s assuming things get this far. The energy market in the UK is split up into generation, distribution and supply arms, and some energy companies do all three, others don’t, those that were just suppliers for example, likely the ones who collapsed as energy prices soared, all blamed Putin of course, not rampant profiteering, it’s strange how that war in Ukraine is still going on yet our energy costs came down somewhat isn’t it?
But the generation arm of the energy market, is highly competitive and it is the very same companies being asked to invest in this GB Energy project, that are already energy generators themselves. So ask yourself why would they invest in something that will be a competitor of theirs in, another one, in an already competitive energy generation market? What kind of a bung is Starmer going to have to offer them to overcome that, to get this farce of a plan off the ground? It would be so much easier to just do what this should have been, which is a fully nationalised green energy generator and supplier to us, to drive energy prices down and force things in the direction of green energy use and complete decarbonisation of the energy market in the UK? Well, if that’s what you want, a renationalised energy sector that will go green and is government controlled, you’d better vote Green to get green.
It is just one more lie it seems to add to Starmer’s litany of them, the man just keeps giving ammunition to his rivals and no-one has both the media platform and the desire to expose his dishonesty, complete hypocrisy aside of course, than the Tories who are rapidly making their election campaign all about actually being honest than Starmer, exposing his lies, drawing attention to them, and he has to answer for that, details on this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.