NOTWITHSTANDING the “hot strike summer” and looming further industrial action, unions are still too weak to exert a significant positive impact on raising the real value of wages across the whole of the economy.

Indeed, in the private sector – which is by far the biggest sector with 20 million workers compared to eight million in the public sector – union density is now just 13%. Not even some spectacular deals gained by Unite, with 10% or even 20%-plus rises, change this picture.

This means workers need to begin to look for other ways to end the cost of living crisis – especially because wages are only one side of the equation that makes it up. The other side is, of course, prices. It’s here that radical thinking must come up with solutions. Fortunately, we do not need to reinvent the wheel on this issue because we can look back on previous practice and see how such measures fared.

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Fundamentally, they are about price controls on all aspects of the basic items that are needed to live a decent and civilised life: food, energy, fuel, utilities, transport, rent, mortgages, clothes and caring services being the most important.

Let’s take some steps back first though. On energy prices, some Tories want to put as much responsibility upon individuals to manage the crisis by advocating wearing more jumpers and turning the heating down.

Advocacy of individual responsibility couched in the language of choice seeks to take away any scrutinising of themselves and the masters they serve, in this instance the executive and shareholders of energy companies.

Nobody now advocates shopping around for a better energy deal, showing that the Ofgem-managed market for energy is so broken that this is no longer an option. Instead, we need a collective solution that fully recognises that heating and warmth are human rights and that ability to pay cannot be allowed to trump human need.

Other means of raising wages and income, such as the independent living wage or a Universal Basic Income are again not enough as they only represent one side of the cost of living equation. We must reject government subsidising of energy companies, through “spend now, pay back later” schemes. This is just another case of “socialism for the bosses”.

The way to go about making all the essentials needed for a decent and civilised standard of living is to have not just price controls but also make many of them free at the point of need and use. First, we need to remember that price controls on the likes of food and rent are not something from another planet – even if this may at first sight seem to be the case as the market now rules supreme after forty long years of neo-liberalism and privatisation.

Price controls are restrictions implemented by governments on the prices that can be charged for goods, commodities and services. Currently, we are concerned about price ceilings and not price floors. Their introduction can be in order to maintain affordability in times of plenty and shortages or to control inflation.

In Britain, as elsewhere after the Second World War, price controls were quite extensive on the likes of basic food commodities. Then through the National Board for Prices and Incomes, created by the Harold Wilson Labour government in 1965, there was control of the prices of soap, bread and road haulage. The Prices and Incomes Act 1966 reinforced this trajectory. The major problem was that this Labour government – and the subsequent Tory one under Edward Heath, with its own versions of these acts and initiatives like price freezes – sought to use them to control inflation rather than ensure affordability. Their concern was the macro-economic stability of capitalism rather than the living standards of ordinary citizens.

So, price controls have not just been used in times of war and other emergencies. They can be part of mainstream political practice as was also the case in France and Italy.

Regulation of gas and electricity prices in Britain remains something of an oddity. Labour tinkered around the issue by introducing the Winter Fuel Payment for people aged over 60 and the Warm Home Discount scheme. But it was Theresa May who introduced the price cap in 2018 saying “the energy market is not working for ordinary working families” as part of her promise to make an economy and society that “works for everyone”.

In the case of energy and other utilities such as water, transport and communications, the easiest way to institute price controls is by having the providers of these services brought back into public ownership.

Being able to regulate prices easily and effectively through nationalisation is exactly what the French government did with EDF, France’s main energy company, in July after finding that forcing EDF in 2021 to sell energy to other providers at a discounted rate did not have the desired effect.

Public ownership would also allow making public transport or broadband free an awful lot easier, too. Here the price ceiling would be zero, being free at the point of use but paid out of general taxation.

Conventional criticism considers restraining prices or making services free increases demand to the point that it outstrips supply, creating inflation. This is somewhat ironic because, as recession looms, demand needs to be stimulated, but in an egalitarian and environmentally friendly way. It will take a radical political will to bring about such changes, whether at Holyrood or Westminster. Even though 72% of Conservative voters favour temporary nationalisation of energy companies, we can discount the Tories here.

Labour under Starmer and Sarwar will not push the envelope. So, while the Scottish Greens supported nationalisation of the energy companies while the SNP did not, it was disappointing that in July the SNP and Scottish Greens voted against an amendment from socialist MSP Mercedes Villalba to freeze rents as a short-term measure before any action results from a review of rent controls – which is due to be completed by the end of this Parliament in 2026.

The SNP and Greens have now agreed to introduce emergency legislation to implement a rent freeze. While welcome, this could have been done earlier and freezes rent at an already sky-high level. A compulsory lowering of rents would have been much better to make up for the earlier mis-step.

Professor Gregor Gall is a visiting professor of industrial relations at the University of Leeds