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[deliberate] Mistake Blog


Latest post: Oil & Gas part 1


What's going on?
Why are profits so big?
Where's the deliberate mistake?

What’s going on?

Oil and gas companies are raking in billions of pounds of profit at the same time as poverty hits working families the worst it has in over a decade – possibly longer. The exact figure varies depending on who/when/where you’re looking at. The principle is important to remember: some companies have profited, over a billion, in a year or less.

Let’s be clear on what a billion pounds of profit actually is. Take profit. It means that they have paid every bill they owe (covered their costs) and made more money on top of that – it’s spare cash for the company or its owners. And a billion pounds? Well, the average salary in the UK would take around 30,000 years to earn that much. What could we do with £1bn. There are around 200,000 homeless people in the UK; in shared housing, £1bn would be enough to give all our homeless people a place to live for a year.* Looking to the future, the winter will be particularly tough. So it seems like, as the slogan gains popularity in the UK, enough is enough. The government and others can challenge/change the way things are with fuel companies.




Image from Pixabay

Why are energy companies’ profits so big?

I have found four main reasons:

  1. The oil and gas business is very expensive to get into. Even very talented people can’t start this sort of firm, so companies can charge what they like and we have few real alternatives

  2. Energy caps aren’t working. They were introduced to protect people from fuel poverty, and now we have huge profits at the same time as people can’t afford fuel… go figure.

  3. Profits are seen as usual – they’re ‘normalised’.
    “Wait a minute, are you suggesting we should not allow businesses to keep what they earned?!”
    Tempting, but no. Fuel companies make huge profits every year. We’re only making a fuss this year because it’s more and every else is worse off. Maybe it’s time to start having the conversation about how big companies really should get before we tax profits more heavily.

  4. Price increases hide the truth. When companies tell us global supply chains are disrupted, when they tell us that oil/gas costs have increased, they use that to justify price increases. Whilst some costs increased, the new prices more than compensate for that. Have they paid their cleaners, rig workers, administrators, clerks, mechanics that same percentage more too? I think not.

So where's the [deliberate] mistake?

  • The government has not kept energy caps low - that's a mistake. If the caps aren't capping, something's gone wrong

  • We have a collective idea, a sort of group understanding that profit is 'okay'. That's not completely wrong, but it is worth thinking about when that starts to make less sense. Until corporations start using profits for socially responsible goals, we might want to rethink how shareholders get richer and richer.

  • More to follow. . .

There's plenty left to unpack.

→ How did fuel companies get so powerful?
→ Why does the government not do more?


Coming soon... the [deliberate] mistakes with: Oil and Gas pt 2; How we value work; Money, money, money; Privilege; Tolerance vs. Violence