Good place to hit back

It is true that this is most clearly to be seen in the oil industry, but the relatively newly privatised utilities are now running that pack of vultures a close second for bare-faced cheek.

Oil prices are running out of control, jacking up the cost of transport and, subsequently, almost everything else that has to be moved from A to B, including food.

Housing is soaring out of the reach of all but the lucky or the very wealthy. In the electricity and gas industries, regular double-figure price rises are now so commonplace as to be almost unremarkable.

And now the privatised water companies are at it, with inflation-busting rises being sought almost across the board.

Britain's largest water company Thames Water now says that it wants to raise bills by around 3 per cent on top of inflation each year between 2010 and 2015.

And United Utilities, which manages water distribution in the north-west of England, is aiming to hit customers' average bills with an increase of just over 2 per cent a year during the same five-year period, plus, of course, normal inflation.

It's as well to put this all in context of company profits, which is something that the companies rarely seem to do, for obvious reasons.

In June of this year, Thames Water revealed that its profits had jumped by 34 per cent during the year, which was not really surprising, given that, according to a statement by water watchdog Ofwat in 2006, Thames is allowed to charge an average increase of 24 per cent over 2005-10, excluding inflation.

United Utilities didn't do so badly either, with pre-tax profits of £475.6 million, an increase of 17 per cent on last year, capital expenditure on infrastructure climbing 45 per cent to £826 million and, as chief executive Philip Green bragged, "We remain on course to return £1.5 billion to shareholders."

There's obviously money in that water industry, but you wouldn't think it, looking at the rises that its biggest beasts are trying to push through Ofwat.

Put rises of this magnitude in the context of a government determined to limit pay rises to below-inflation levels in the public sector - which employs many of Britain's poorest paid workers - and resistant to restoring the rights ripped away from the trade unions by the Tories, thus limiting their capacity to fight back all the way across private and public sectors, and you have a very nasty situation indeed.

An ostensibly Labour government is intent on collaborating with capitalism in reversing every advance made by working people since the Attlee government.

Prices rising, wages falling, employment less secure than it has been since the '30s, the gap between rich and poor widening, employers with a growing confidence, and a weak and failing Prime Minister devoted to warmongers abroad and profiteers at home.

There is little camouflage left for new Labour now. It is clearly and demonstrably the agent of capitalism and must be hounded out of our movement. Pathetic and risible leadership bids by the likes of Miliband and, God help us all, Milburn, must be treated with the contempt that they deserve.

Forcing the government to put some teeth into its cringing watchdogs and rejecting the developing pauperisation of working-class people seems to be a good place to start the fightback.