Britain’s working class is once again being told to pay for an imperialist war it never chose, never voted for, and never benefited from.
Household energy prices are set to rise by 13% in July after wholesale gas costs surged following the US-Israeli war against Iran. Ofgem says a household using a “typical” amount of gas and electricity will now pay £221 more a year, bringing annual bills up to £1,862. Suppliers are already warning that costs could climb even further by winter if the conflict continues.
The immediate trigger was Iran’s response to US and Israeli attacks, which effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow shipping route through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas normally passes. Global gas prices jumped by around 25%, feeding directly into British household bills.
Predictably, the British political establishment is presenting this as though it were some kind of natural disaster: an unfortunate “external shock” descending from nowhere. In reality, Britain is not a neutral bystander caught in the crossfire. The British state materially backed both the genocidal assault on Gaza and the broader campaign against Iran through military cooperation, intelligence support, diplomatic cover, and integration into the US-led imperialist bloc.
Now ordinary people are being handed the bill.
Workers are expected to absorb another £18 a month in costs while energy corporations continue making profits and the government lectures people about “managing” their energy use. Gas bills are expected to rise by 24%, electricity bills by 5%.
Ofgem chief executive Tim Jarvis said: “We understand many will be concerned about rising prices.
“While energy use typically falls over the summer months, there are still practical steps households can take to manage costs, including exploring fixed tariffs or changing their payment method.”
This is the same logic British workers have heard for years: turn the thermostat down, shower less, heat fewer rooms, tolerate lower living standards. The burden is always individualized. Imperialist war, capitalist profiteering, and market dependency are treated as untouchable facts of life, while workers are told to become more “efficient” at enduring hardship.
The ruling class is especially eager to obscure the fact that energy prices were already catastrophically high before this latest war. British households are still paying around £600 more per year than before the 2022–23 energy crisis — a crisis intensified not only by the war in Ukraine itself, but by Western governments’ deliberate decision to sanction Russian gas supplies and restructure European energy markets around US geopolitical interests.
That decision had predictable consequences. Europe replaced relatively cheap pipeline gas with more volatile and expensive global LNG markets, leaving households permanently exposed to price spikes tied to imperialist conflict and speculation.
Now the same governments responsible for that policy are pretending that another energy shock has simply fallen from the sky.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband attempted to distance the government from responsibility, saying: “The rise in the price cap because of a war we did not choose is deeply unwelcome news for households across the country. We know people were under pressure before this crisis, and that’s why easing that burden is our number one priority.”
But Britain did choose its alignment. The British state chose integration into US military strategy. It chose confrontation with Iran. It chose sanctions regimes that devastated energy stability across Europe. And, as always under capitalism, the consequences are socialized onto the working class while profits remain privatized.
The effects are especially brutal for disabled people and poorer households. Many disabled people rely on specialist medical or accessibility equipment that requires constant electricity use. Millions of workers have already spent years rationing heat, taking shorter showers, sealing draughts, and living in partially heated homes simply to survive.
Even Ofgem quietly admitted that its supposedly “typical” household energy usage estimates have dropped because people are using less energy than before, not because their needs disappeared, but because high prices forced them to cut back. In other words, official figures are being adjusted around declining living standards.
Meanwhile Energy UK, the industry body representing suppliers, complained that Britain’s dependence on gas leaves it vulnerable to conflicts abroad. What it did not mention is that this dependence is itself the result of decades of privatization, deindustrialization, underinvestment, and subordination to the interests of finance capital and imperialist strategy.
Capitalism produces crisis after crisis, then presents each one as an isolated emergency with no history and no system behind it. But there is a direct line connecting imperialist war abroad, sanctions regimes, privatized energy markets, and pensioners sitting in cold flats in Britain.
The same system that funds bombs, sanctions, and military escalation is the one telling workers they must “tighten their belts” to afford heating.
