As the cold Scottish weather draws ever closer, we start to think of something Margaret Thatcher said, "society is all about choices". Many of us will be faced with making some of those choices, do we eat, or do we heat? The cruelty and injustice of this system is apparent all around us, all the year long, but in winter it shouts loudest. Thousands of our people die each winter from avoidable cold related illnesses, fuel poverty is a mass killer. It is difficult to imagine why we tolerate this winter killer epidemic in the knowledge that the corporate energy companies are making hundreds of millions of pounds annually. Scottish Power, which is typical of those companies, raised its prices last year by 7%, this year it made over £700 million pre-tax profit, and hand its parent company Iberdrola, almost £900 million. Despite this, they are talking about increasing prices again. That's a lot of money siphoned from us to hand to a bunch of greed driven shareholders, while the price we pay, is living with the mass killer, fuel poverty and the resultant misery and deaths. Like everything in this society, it's not that there isn't enough, it's just that you are excluded, because you can't afford it, be it luxury or necessity. I call it financial apartheid.
