Chair of the East Devon Alliance, Martin Shaw, writes for the Herald.

It looks likely to be a very grim autumn. Later this month, the new energy price cap will be announced and the annual bill for an average household is expected to rise to £3,300 in
October, and then to £3,600 - or £300 a month - in January.

That’s around £2400, or £200 a month, more than last year.

The government is giving households only £400 for six months from October, or £66 per month, with pensioners getting an extra £300 and people on benefits £650 in one-off payments.

Welcome as any help is, it’s obvious that there will be huge gaps for everyone to cover.

Many people in Devon who are less well off, including families with children, could literally face a choice between heating and eating.

This is a national emergency and the government could ask Parliament for emergency powers, as it did in in the pandemic.

The price cap is based on international market prices, but much of our gas comes from the North Sea.

So the government could take the power to limit its price to the costs of production, lowering the overall price of gas for the UK.

Under the price cap mechanism, electricity prices are tied to the price of gas, but much of our electricity comes from wind, solar and nuclear power, not gas.

The government has just launched a consultation ‘exploring changes to the wholesale electricity market that would stop volatile gas prices setting the price of electricity produced by much cheaper renewables’.

In this emergency, the government could make temporary changes to the market to reduce electricity prices now, rather than waiting for the consultation to produce long-term changes.

If the government is unwilling to take these powers, it could still introduce a much more swingeing windfall tax on the billions of super-profits which the energy companies are making from our over-payments, much of which they are handing over to
shareholders.

They should put the money back into the pockets of ordinary consumers and small businesses.

My point is that the threatened suffering of the most vulnerable, the drastic reduction in living standards for everyone, and the recession which is now forecast, are not inevitable.

They are political choices, because the government is letting them happen. It is beyond time that, as money expert Martin Lewis has suggested, Boris Johnson (who is still drawing his prime ministerial salary), Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss get round a table and
produce a proper answer to the crisis.

Lewis’s point was that the Conservatives are indulging themselves in a petty-minded leadership contest while millions of people face dire hardship. In her fervour to outdo her rival, Truss actually proposed regional pay boards which would impose lower pay in
regions like the South West. Instead of levelling up, there would be a huge levelling down for people whose real incomes are already being slashed by inflation.

She had to withdraw the proposal, but not before lying - Johnson-style - about what she had originally suggested.

By promising ever bigger tax cuts, the Tory candidates are demonstrating that they simply don’t live in the world that most of us inhabit, where public services are withering on the vine, school buildings are falling down, local councils are threatened with going bust, and NHS waiting times are still growing and growing.

Johnson likes to boast that, whatever his failings, he ‘got the big calls right’. But from the cost of living and pandemic emergencies to education and the NHS, quite the opposite is true.

On the biggest call of all, global heating, the government has talked the talk but not walked the walk, and the leadership contest has seen deniers gaining ground.

Johnson’s period in office has seen Britain go downhill, with his Brexit making everything worse.

As I’ve said before, after twelve wasted years of Conservative rule, it’s time for a change.