Tories finally return to an Energy Price Cap with measure that is tentative first step on road to easing cost of living burden for many

Photograph: Twilight power lines from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

Finally, a piece of domestic legislation from the government emerges. After a year of prevaricating, the government's promised energy price cap seems to have at last begun it's journey through Parliament.

The energy price cap had been a feature of the Conservative manifesto at the last election, but was jettisoned along with most of their agenda in the aftermath - sacrificed on the Brexit altar.

The opposition has been pressing the government of late to return to the measure. There are many households burdened by the high cost of living and any help extended to them is to be welcomed - and hopefully that is what the Domestic Gas and Electricity Bill will do.

The government had chosen to pursue a less interventionist, less confrontational, approach in the form of promoting how customers could switch tariffs and companies to get a better deal. But customers just weren't playing the markets.

So, with prices continuing to rise more than wages, squeezing households month on month, the government has been forced to take action to tackle the cost of living. But it won't be an easy sell to either the energy industry or to all Conservatives.

When the Tories first announced their interest in a energy price cap, the government's approach was to follow the system for capping pre-payment - with a maximum figure, an absolute cap, based on the lowest regional price that is reviewed biannually.

Energy firms have already expressed discontent. When the layoff of two thousand workers in Britain was announced, Centrica blamed them on the impending prospect of a price cap. Others have been calling for any cap to have 'headroom' to allow competition.

Such arguments are accompanied by the opinion of right-wing think tanks like the IEA, who argue a price cap will give minimal help to those who don't switch, end the benefit that switchers get, and entrench the Big Six - who benefit from the support of government subsidies - at the expense of their smaller competitors.

The progressive view on energy costs anchors on the essential nature of energy - along with other utilities like water. People simply cannot live without their utility supply. That creates an easily exploitable monopoly that must be closely monitored - at the least.

However, there isn't always agreement on how to actually run these services among progressives. But there are plenty who are unconvinced by either extreme - nationalised or privatised. Making switching suppliers easier and capping prices is a sort of middle ground.

So too is the Corbyn-era Labour proposal, to reconstitute municipal and regional public run - whether by cooperatives, non-profits or local authorities - utility companies to establish a basic, baseline affordable supply for everyone to compete with the corporate Big Six.

With Theresa May's admiration for Joseph Chamberlain, she should have little consternation at the prospect of municipal services. As the mayor of Birmingham, he was among the pioneers of local government as an active participant in improving the services for local people.

And for all the arguing back and forth, there is a lot of common ground between Labour and the Conservatives here. In fact, the Tories have pretty much adopted the policy wholesale from Ed Miliband, who had campaigned hard for an energy price freeze.

For this reason, when it comes down to it, the Domestic Gas and Electricity Bill may have a quick passage through Parliament - with the govt able to rely on opposition support to fend off any backbench concerns about interfering with markets.

What is clear is that households are under a lot of pressure - not least those forced to pay upfront for utilities because of poor credit scores. This situation just reinforces the absurd debt-traps that surround those with insecure work and low pay.

Drastic reductions in the price of a basic supply of energy is one move. Making that permanently available through a municipal energy supplier would be a complimentary second. A third would be removing the credit score entry qualifications, to help people get away from expensive, exploitative, pay upfront deals.

Pay caps may very well not be a long term solution. But the more pressing concern is to, on every front possible, unpick the nets cast into the churning water surrounding the poorest and most vulnerable.

Little Victories: Tackling energy costs would be a small win with big consequences

Photograph: Power Lines from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

We're living in times of big conflicts. Fascism has reared it's ugly head (in various guises), there are big changes under way in international politics and for the first time in three decades, a nuclear war is again talked about as something that might actually happen. It can all get overwhelming.

If you're feeling overwrought, remember that the big problems are rarely overcome with grandstanding solutions. More often, they're broken down into more manageable problems with little victories adding up to a much more profound and lasting change. As Bobby Kennedy put it:

"Each time a man [sic] stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest wall of oppression and resistance."

That is the task ahead of progressives in Britain: to send out the little ripples that build into a wave. But where to start? One opportunity on the horizon is opening on the cost of living.

Over the summer recess, pressure has been building within the Conservative Party over the May Government's decision to drop promises of tough measures to tackle the energy sector. That pressure is mounting towards a rupture.

On Sunday, 53 Conservative MPs signed a letter to Theresa May that demanded a reinstatement of the energy price pledge - that promised to protect ordinary households from the 'Big Six' energy companies - which was dropped from the Queen's Speech.

This backbench rebellion won't be completely selfless concern. At the last election, Tory MPs caught wind of public unhappiness at the unfair burdens that are being piled onto them. These MPs have to act to save their seats.

But there-in lies an opportunity. 53 rebel MPs is a huge problem for Theresa May, who holds only a slim majority. If the opposition is united, the government will have little choice but to take action or face a possible defeat in the Commons.

In the short term, that might lead to a small material improvement for the most vulnerable households. That in itself would be a welcome and tangible help to people just trying to get by. A small win for a good cause.

Little victories, however, build into much larger ones. Changing the government's direction would also have a much wider and lasting impact. Acting to regulate the energy market strikes a blow against deregulation - the market fundamentalist belief that outcomes are better when oversight and rules are limited.

Acting to regulate the energy market admits market failures. Admits that, left to their own devices, companies in deregulated markets can fall into unfairness and exploitation that produce worse outcomes for the many to the profit of the few.

For those feeling overwhelmed in tumultuous times, this is a grounded cause. A small win for people trying to keep their living costs down, would strike blow against exploitative capitalism. One foot in front of the other, one step at a time.

Asylum distribution scandal less about immigration and more about inequality

Photograph: The clock tower of Rochdale town hall from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

Over the weekend, there were reports of anger at the way those seeking asylum in Britain were being distributed across the country. These people were being sent to the poorest communities, while the richest communities often took not a single person (Lyons & Duncan, 2017).

One town particularly affected was Rochdale, a small town with an outsized history as a progressive beacon. It was the birthplace of the co-operative movement and, against the grain in Britain, supported the Union and the abolition of slavery during the American Civil War (Keegan, 2010; Cash, 2013) - despite the pain of the loss of cotton imports from the Confederacy.

Even in a town with that historical backdrop, there is anger that is framed and understood through the lens of anti-immigration sentiment (Lyons, 2017). But that misses the point, as much of the distracting immigration anger has done so far. The real issue is inequality.

As the figures show, without the funding to match, the burden that comes with caring and including those people seeking asylum is being dropped into the hands of the country's poorest communities (Lyons & Duncan, 2017).

Communities that have already been hit hard by cuts to local government budgets (Butler, 2017) - services have been stretched and funds are scarce. It has been Conservative policy for some time to shift responsibilities away from central government without funding.

All the while, the Right seeks to misdirect the anger at this situation onto 'immigrants' - to those fleeing danger and murder, or the refugees of war. But the figures clearly show the real problem: Britain's wealthiest communities are not pulling their weight or sharing the burdens.

This isn't isolated to asylum. Look at the energy and the environment. Communities, particularly Conservative constituencies, have refused green energy technology, like wind farms, as 'eyesores' blighting their communities (Hennessy, 2012). But where is their outcry against their energy coming from dirty plants in poorer neighbourhoods?

While this unequal distribution of burdens paints Britain in a bad light, . Part of the opposition to the expansion of green energy has been the unequal distribution of its financial benefits (Mason, 2012) and in every community there can be a found positive and charitable support for those seeking asylum from danger.

From Saffiyah Khan, the woman who stood up and peacefully faced a nationalist group when they surrounded a counter-protesting woman (BBC, 2017); to the peaceful and charitable disposition found in communities across the country (Lyons, 2017); there are innumerable examples that Britain has broad shoulders and can make light of its burdens.

But not when all of the burdens are dropped on the poorest communities. Not when the wealthiest communities exempt themselves, sending the unfortunate and desperate somewhere else without even the support funding to match.

It's one rule for conservative Britain and another for everyone else. Like in ancient Athens: "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must". That adage is not good enough and should be left buried in the past where it belongs.

All the pressures of the 1930s were collected in the Spanish Civil War, which reminds us that progressives must unite and start writing the story of our times

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This summer marked the eightieth anniversary of the Spanish Civil War and this week, eighty years ago, the International Brigades marched into Madrid to defend the Republic from Franco's Nationalists.

The volunteers of the International Brigades came from around the world, including much needed experienced soldiers from the Great War. Of the first three thousand soldiers, most died in the first days of the Battle of Madrid, to stall the fascist advance and delay their victory - even as the Republic's nominal international allies stood by and watched, moderates outraged by Republican radicalism and hoping to merely contain or appease the far right.

Ultimately, however, the Nationalists conclusively conquered Spain and completed their mutinous coup d'etat. But it would not have been possible without plenty of international help of their own, from the fascist dictators of Germany and Italy - who sent professional forces and materiel to Franco.

These tales of the far right spreading, of progressives and moderates lost and struggling to unify or to recognise their commonality, of strife between progress and tradition, is a compellingly recognisable one today for those watching the rise of Trump in America, or Brexit in the UK and the Front National in France. So too is the appeasement and the retreat to reactive, surrendering the creation of the story of the times to the far right.

Spain's second shortlived Republic died beneath the boot of international fascist cooperation, even as the dozens of progressive factions fell upon each. And with it was swept away the achievements of the Republic's almost recklessly progressive government.

Under Manuel Azana and his Republican Left, an amalgamation of different republican parties, the dismantling of the overbearing establishment began. First as Prime Minister and then as President, Azana led efforts to modernise Spain, to make it secular, open and tolerant.

It pursued the three most prominent aspects of the establishment: the army, the church and the landowners. An Army with 800 generals, but just 16 divisions in need of them, was faced with reforms, redundancies and cuts. The Church, as under the Radicals in France a few decades earlier, faced the secularising of education - ostensibly to take the poor out from under its grip and influence. And an agrarian reform program, sought to confiscate large private landholdings (latifundia) and distribute them among the rural poor.

However, these progressive and secular policies - sought by the Republican Left in a Popular Front partnership with regional nationalists, discontented workers with strong trade unions, and an anarchist movement without parallel anywhere in the world in either scope or success - were being pursued in a country with a deeply embedded and deeply conservative establishment, only recently shorn of its figureheads, that felt vulnerable and was not yet ready for such radical reform. The pressed on, but did not take enough of a frightened people with them.

Violent clashes erupted between the Left and establishment Right. Propaganda was everywhere. Into the vacuum opened by the old establishment's ousting stepped fascism and it spoke to conservatives of all classes: it spoke to their prejudices and condoned them, spoke to their fears and made them feel strong, spoke to their problems and offered scapegoats.

In the time of Brexit and President Elect Donald J Trump, were the centre is failing and the radical Left and far Right are competing for the support of the disaffected, it seems that the problems of the 1930s - crystallised in the factional divides of Spain - have resurfaced.

The poor, the 'white working-class', found themselves on many sides - Left, Right and Centre - in the 1930s, and do so again today. Roosevelt built an alliance with them in the United States, but Hitler rallied them in Germany. In Spain they were divided, progressive from conservative. International allies, progressives and moderates, did not get behind the Republic and only reacted, seeking only contain, embrace and control the far right movements.

The question being asked - honestly, since as long ago as 2008 and the start of social democracy's decline - is how progressives can 'reconnect' with the working class, seemingly more convinced by the far right's appeals to their conservative values.

One argument that has persisted, and has been seen most readily in the UK and distressingly amongst moderates, has stressed the need to at least lightly indulge bigotry with populist appeals. To abandon openness and tolerance, in the name of the allegedly 'greater good' of grabbing power.

The trouble with that argument is that it treats the views of the people as innate and unshakeable values, even adopts them and praises them as 'tradition' - with nationalism, for instance, treated as a universal given. All that has done is fan the flames, encouraging and spreading intolerance, helping it to find a language and context to legitimise itself.

It also discounts the possibility of changing minds. While there are surely some with deeply ingrained and unwaveringly intolerant nationalism beating in their breast, history teaches that most just want a better life and are looking for a compelling narrative that inspires their confidence.

The times, the pressures, and the dominant narratives by which we understand them - these things play crucial roles in where the people will place their confidence, whether in the Left or in the Right. And it is control over these forces that progressives have surrendered, too much for far too long, in the name of an electoral strategy aimed at taking and holding power.

In the 1930s, fascism spread while its opponents were divided and weakened - often co-opting the establishment and its traditional values as its own. The Republic in Spain was left isolated by international allies even as the people took up arms, in many countries, to defend it.

But the Republic also lost an important fight: it failed to organise, to coordinate, to align its factional narratives into a single compelling story. And many of those factions saw those supported more conservative groups as inherently opponents, and attacked them and alienated them.

As in the 1930s, the far right has gotten to grips with the forces at play and produced a seductive narrative, absolving national majorities of fault and offering them simplistic, crude solutions that play to revisionist nostalgia - aided by a conservative elite that still hope to exploit or control these movements as they grow.

But where is the progressive alternative?

The American Presidential Election is yet another warning to progressives, of all factions from radical to moderate, that differences must be put aside in pursuit of the broader aims of justice and liberty, equality and empowerment, and in all of these sustainability.

The issues affecting the working poor are clear: housing and energy cost too much, work is precarious and pays too little, opportunities and security are scarce and fragile. Ideas around community and cooperative action, of democratic empowerment, that confronts these ills even exists.

So where is the progressive narrative?

It isn't progressive to dismiss the fears of the working class, but nor is it to blindly embrace the narratives spread among them by the far right. The reality is that to achieve true progressive reform you must take the people with you.

To do that, if the Left is to reach out to people, it needs its own compelling story to explain the times. That means bringing together policies into a vision, of the present and the future. And for that to be effective, the Left has to stop surrendering to the Right the creation of the story that explains our times.

To achieve its goals, the Living Wage must be part of a comprehensive policy of reform

The Living Wage Foundation has designated this week as Living Wage Week, with the aim of spreading a broader awareness of the measure and what it fights for: the right to a decent standard of living (Ainsley, 2016).

Its launch coincides with the announcements today of the recommended living wage, as part of the voluntary living wage scheme, being instituted by civil administrations in London, Scotland and Wales along with a number of major firms (Living Wage Foundation, 2016) - the actual Living Wage, higher than the government's 'National Living Wage'.

At a time of rising prices and economic uncertainty, an increase in pay will be a very welcome boost for many of the most vulnerable and those facing hard times. But the idea of minimum wages has been controversial in economics. There are sore divisions over the idea of an intervention through the law to 'artificially' raise wages.

For those on the neoliberal economic right, setting minimum wage thresholds are an artificial inflation of the costs of business, where costs are seen as the primary problem. From their view, the priority should be to reduce costs, so to increase competition, and through both together to reduce prices - allowing market-set wages to go further (The Economist, 2015).

On the interventionist economic left, there has been a delicate negotiated balance to strike. With trade unions for instance, there is a need achieve better returns for workers on the one hand, while also ensuring the long term affordability of pay so as to avoid future closures and lay offs.

What particularly concerns both Left and Right is that business, faced with wage inflation, may decide they have little choice but to begin to replace many basic low pay jobs with cheaper automation (The Economist, 2015{2}).

It is absolutely clear that it is just that people get proper returns for a their labour. And further, it makes sense. The OECD has stressed that economic inequality hurts economic growth and therefore the general prosperity (OECD, 2014). That makes measures of redistribution from shareholders to workers, and a fairer distribution of the 'rewards' between them, essential.

However. There can be no complacency. An economy is an intricate web and pulling at one string has knock on affects for the whole network - especially when progressive administrations are not the only ones pulling strings that have decisive results. To achieve the aim of a decent standard of living, just wages must be seen as an integral part of a broader policy of reform, which must look also to the other side of the equation: the cost of living.

In two key sectors, in housing and in energy, high costs have a devastating impact on the economy and the lives of all citizens, especially the most vulnerable. A secure wage goes hand in hand with secure housing and affordable energy - a Living Wage needs the companionship of a Living Rent.

The third aspect of any broad progressive economic policy has to be tackling the thoroughly unequal distribution of power over economic decision-making. Too much decision-making power is concentrated in the hands of too few, creating vested interests inclined to behave like cartels.

Only with all three together - giving citizens the guarantee of a reasonable reward for work, the security of basic housing and energy, and enfranchisement in the making of economic decisions - can the economy serve the needs and wishes of citizens rather than just those of narrow and self-serving interest groups.

And, as a final note, the fear of automation must at some point be addressed. With it, there will also need to be an assessment of our attitudes to welfare, to how work is rewarded, and even our definition of work itself. Above all pursuing one goal: that progress should serve citizens, not disinherit them.

Rail chaos opens discussion of alternatives: Mutuals and co-ops offer community a stake, instead of rentiers who extract local wealth and without Whitehall centralisation

Photograph: Brighton Station from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

One of the big issues in the past few weeks has been the Southern Railways shambles, that has again exposed deep problems with the British system of rail franchises - at least three rail franchises face major strike action in the coming weeks (Topham, 2016; Topham, 2016{2}).

The franchise system has faced plenty of criticism. At the core is that a rail franchise is little more than permission to set up a toll booth and start extracting rent, squeezed out with higher prices, cuts to staff and services, and limiting expensive maintenance (Chakraborrty, 2016; Woodman, 2012; Milne, 2012).

Solutions to what are natural monopolies is not a simple matter. As a result much was made of Jeremy Corbyn's 2015 leadership election promise to renationalise the railways (Mason, 2016) - a brave decision for a party all too easily beaten over the head as centralising, bureaucratic, exorbitant spenders with a disdain for free enterprise (Kellner, 2014).

The latest round of railway chaos put Corbyn's policy of renationalisation on the table for a Readers' debate in The Guardian yesterday (Marsh & Walsh, 2016). The nature of the discussion was interesting to watch.

There was positivity towards renationalisation to be found, with some pointing to the more than a few good examples of public run transport services around Europe. In Paris, or in Germany, there are well maintained railways that are run for considerably lower fares than in the UK (Williams, 2015).

However, it was particularly interesting to see the perception that the only options being offered came in the form of a polarised dynamic, limited to either privatisation under greedy rentiers or nationalisation under inflexible Whitehall bureaucrats.

In fact commenters even went beyond that to observe that the railways in Britain are actually both and neither. That the railways are a kind of national-corporate cartel, with infrastructure nationalised while profit-making services were privatised - even more confusingly, often into the hands of state-owned companies from other countries.

What was clear in people's thoughts was that by some means the running of the rails needs to be decentralised, either with more lines or with more options. That no one interest should be given too much leverage, whether trade unions or rentier investors. And that responsibility for the rails should not be separated from the train services.

That combination, of well run public service and the need for decentralisation, in fact plays into the actual substance of Corbyn's policy, which was for public though not necessarily state railways (Connor, 2015). What Corbyn actually called for was to mutualise the railways as worker-consumer coops.

In mutualism, there is a path that has cut across progressive party lines. From Labour, and obviously the Co-operative Party, to the Liberal Democrats, the idea of workers taking a greater stake has a deep history. Whether as worker-management co-operation, workers on boards, or share-ownership schemes, at least a low level version of mutualism has long been proposed by those on all sides. But the present crisis in Britain's services calls for a deeper commitment.

There is much that mutualism can offer, even within the slow to change framework of capitalism. Autonomy, not least, for people to exercise power over their own working lives. And equity, a meaningful stake in the product of their own work. Between the two, you have a model that challenges both the lopsided struggle between workers and management that often leads to exploitation, on the one hand, and the extraction of wealth, on the other.

Fear of alienation by bureaucratic centralism is understandable in the running of essential services, from housing to energy and transport. But so is the pain caused by exploitative, extractive rentiers, and it has been clearly stated. Too much is taken out of communities, extracted as profit by rentiers (Milne, 2014) - who use wealth to step in and set up toll booths on essential local services. Little is ever fed back into the communities from which these private taxes are levied.

Mutualism and cooperation present an alternative. Working examples are already out there, tying the product of a community's resources to those communities, serving the common good without overbearing central control. But they need support to break through public-private corporatism and that means government to rethink how it intervenes - to be smarter and willing to decentralise.

Britain's tented Hoovervilles show the reality of the humanitarian crisis behind the debt and deficit obsession of the Great Recession

Desperation, in the time of recession and austerity, has led to tented encampments springing up across the UK. This one lies a stones throw from Manchester Piccadilly station.

Iain Duncan Smith framed his resignation as the drastic last straw of a reformer, who's efforts were curtailed by the Chancellor's obsession with austerity (Asthana & Stewart, 2016; Peston, 2016). Whatever the true conviction behind the claim, it highlights something incredibly important.

The economic crisis, to which the Conservatives have ever been keen to keep the eye drawn in the last six years, has masked a wider humanitarian crisis. Only one small moment of the Chancellor's budget statement was devoted to it. He told Members of Parliament that:

"Because under this Government we are not prepared to let people be left behind, I am also announcing a major new package of support worth over £115 million to support those who are homeless and to reduce rough sleeping."

The government tried hard during the election the evade the issue, despite attempts to confront the PM directly with the fact that rising numbers of people were using food banks (Channel 4, 2015; Worrall, 2015). Yet the fact remains that homelessness is still rising (Gentleman, 2016).

In his response to the budget, Jeremy Corbyn welcomed the Chancellor's package of assistance, but stressed that rising homelessness was the result of desperate under-investment by the Conservative government (BBC, 2016{2}). A lack of investment which had starved local government of the resources to help and housing associations of the capacity to offer shelter.

While the Chancellor's budget did offer some funds to 'reduce rough sleeping', it was in reality much less than he previously cut from housing support - estimated at only "£1 in every £5" by Shadow Housing Minister John Healey (Healey, 2016).

It is, however, something more than the approach of some local councils to rough sleeping, which has been less than humanitarian (Ellis-Petersen, 2015). Yet even harsh measures haven't been enough to stop the emergence of small, and not so small, shanty towns springing up in places like Manchester, like the Hoovervilles of the 1920s and 1930s.

Europe and the other half of the crisis

The living encamped amongst the dead, along the Rue Richard through the Cimetière du Montparnasse, in Southern Paris, where tents line the road.

On the face of it, the fact that this is as much a broader European as a specifically British problem, may seem to exonerate the Chancellor and his policies. After all, it would be unfair to blame Osborne for the living lodging amongst the dead on the Rue Richard, at the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.

Yet while Osborne has no part in French system - where, in response to their own crisis, supermarkets are no longer being allowed to throw away surplus food and must donate it instead to help those in need of handouts (Derambarsh, 2016) - he does have a role in the other half of the crisis.

War on Europe's borders has led to a second element of the humanitarian crisis: an influx of refugees, for which Europe was not necessarily lacking in resources to tackle, but certainly appeared unprepared. With the British government unwilling to take on the burden of the refugees, a camp sprang up on the British border at Calais.

That camp grew to become a large slum town, administered by aid workers running soup kitchens and handing out charitable donations. But even that temporary solution could not last and the camp is now being broken up, by force, in order to disperse the refugees (Weaver & Walker, 2016).

Hoover and the Great Depression

As President, Herbert Hoover oversaw the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression. Photograph: Herbert Hoover by Opus Penguin (License) (Cropped)

Osborne's approach, pulling back the state and public investment and looking to free markets and civil society to step in to the breach, has made him seem like a man more concerned about balancing his chequebook than acting in the face of a crisis. With that image, he risks receiving the same reputation that marred President Hoover during the Great Depression, as a 'do-nothing' (Leuchtenburg, 2009).

It isn't hard to draw comparisons between some key aspects of the approaches of George Osborne and Herbert Hoover. As US Secretary of Commerce, for two administrations between 1921 and 1928, Hoover was a follower of the efficiency movement - pursuing the ridding of inefficiency and waste from the economy (Hawley, 2006).

As when Osborne's Conservatives came to power in 2010 advocating for a 'Big Society' (Rigby, 2016), Hoover believed that the means of achieving his economic aims was 'volunteerism', as opposed to direction from government - trusting to, and nominally supporting, individual initiative, typified by his role as director of American charitable relief efforts in post-war Europe, particularly in Belgium.

His subsequent time as President, from 1929 and 1933, was however overshadowed by the Wall Street Crash and the beginning of the Great Depression that saw the poor of New York living in Central Park in tented encampments - one of many American shanty towns that became known as 'Hooverville'.

Hoover made more effort than previous Presidents to arrest the severe economic downturn, including some public works projects. And then (Gray, 1993), as now (Pidd, 2016), civil society stepped up to provide aid and relief. Yet when the election came, Franklin D Roosevelt won, and with his New Deal coalition led the United States for four terms, with a comprehensive and interventionist plan to support and rebuild.

While Osborne avoided the stigma of the crisis hitting on his watch, he has also avoided intervention. Instead he has cut public spending - saying that the roof must be fixed "while the sun is shining". Amidst years of economic turmoil and cuts to social security, while statistics say homelessness has continued to rise (Gentleman, 2016), its difficult to see an application for his maxim.

The cracks and those slipping through

The advent of these modern day Hooverville encampments suggest that there is an unacceptable break down in the welfare safety nets in Britain, in France and elsewhere in Europe. Not all of this can be put down to the pressures of the refugee crisis. There are cracks appearing and people are slipping through.

Throwing money at suppressing the symptoms is not enough. It won't tackle the core problems. As much as the Conservatives want the focus to be on the public debt, in order to justify their agenda, private debt is just as large of a problem. Individuals are hanging on by their fingernails, stretched thin by the high cost of living.

Housing is prohibitively expensive. The cost of energy needs to come down. Work for the lowest paid is too insecure and the safety net too full of holes. George Osborne doesn't have to become a believer in a big  interventionist state overnight to help. At the very least something might be done with small reforms, aimed at properly regulating the energy and housing industry to prevent anti-competitive behaviour and price gouging.

Above all that, Osborne might benefit from accepting a single simple lesson, one that most austerians should take note of: the bad times inevitably end up costing far more than the good.

Conservative Energy Bill changes energy priorities at exactly the wrong time

After a rapid expansion, new community energy projects are in retreat as Europe's governments focus their energies on other problems. Photograph: Solar Panels (License) (Cropped)

Only a month ago, David Cameron, on the UK's behalf, signed the Paris Agreement (ITV, 2015). Those accords, however vague, nonetheless committed Britain and 199 other countries to the reduction of carbon emissions and to work towards a target of zero emissions (Vaughan, 2015).

However today, even as this weekend a senior UN official has praised the agreement for showing that the world can come together (Goldenberg, 2016), Cameron's government is promoting an Energy Bill that is leading the UK away from those goals.

The government's Energy Bill, in the Commons for its second reading, has been criticised for prioritising short term economic gains over the long term picture of sustainability (Lucas, 2016). The bill has been accused of encouraging the pursuit of coal and fossil fuels instead of leaving them in the ground and for failing to address fuel poverty - the scandal that as many as one in ten struggle to afford basic warmth.

That drive towards fossil fuels follows on the heels of cuts to subsidies for community green energy projects, which where allowed to lapse (Harvey & Vaughan, 2015; Vaughan, 2015{2}). Under the Coalition, the Liberal Democrats had encouraged these community projects (Davey, 2013). Their government research showed that community energy projects were sought out by the public to keep costs down, as well as fight climate change and to help in disadvantaged neighbourhoods - making a difference on many social and economic fronts.

These cuts to community energy subsidies and encouragement of fossil fuel recovery would seem to be a drastic change of direction for the government's public stance on energy. However, this disappointing shift in policy would not be the first. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the government had long been undermining its own commitment to clean energy (Monbiot, 2015; Monbiot, 2014), with a previous bill encouraging the maximization of exploitation of fossil fuel resources.

At the time when is there a need not only for clean and sustainable energy but also for a way to take power over the energy we consume out of the hands of big energy companies and despotic states, to increase competition and reduce the cost of energy, support for decentralised clean community energy should be a priority.

Community utilities providers have a proven track record of success in Germany and the US (Thorpe, 2014; Heins, 2015). With community projects still taking their first steps in the UK and the municipal movement in Spain acting as an inspiration across Europe, now is the time to be encouraging communities to get engaged with civic life in pursuit of the common good.