Today, 1st July 2026, the average household energy bill in Britain is set to rise by 13% (or £221), an increase attributed to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the resulting surge in wholesale gas prices. But while working families are pushed deeper into fuel poverty, the world’s 100 largest oil and gas companies are on track to pocket $234 billion in profits this year. Before the US-Zionist war on Iran, the Office for National Statistics projected 2.13 million British households would be in fuel poverty. With this latest hike, that figure will rise exponentially.
Fuel poverty in Britain is the product of capitalist imperialism. Energy prices remain relatively low for the Global North due to the extraction of resources and labour from the Global South at exploitatively low rates. Despite this, the British working class are increasingly experiencing a colonial boomerang effect as privatised energy monopolies treat households as revenue streams.
Decades of privatisation have concentrated energy supply in the hands of a few dominant firms – Shell, British Gas, National Grid – whose profits are shielded by a regulator, Ofgem, that has consistently prioritised shareholder returns over consumer protection. Low wages and frozen welfare benefits compound the problem, leaving millions unable to cover basic costs. Moreover, while poor housing standards force households to burn more fuel for less warmth, taxes from working people flow to the energy companies whose profits are swollen through imperialist wars of aggression.
The trajectory of fuel poverty has its roots in the 1973 Arab oil embargo, which exposed the vulnerability of imperialist powers to energy as a form of leverage by Global South nations and set the scene for the neoliberal transformations that followed in Britain. The discovery of North Sea oil financed a wholesale transfer of public assets to the private sector under Margaret Thatcher and diversified energy sources away from the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), whose members include the leading West Asian, African, and South American oil producers. Energy reforms, supply-side deregulation, and tax burdens shifted from producers to consumers, which served to suppress real wage increases and weaken the bargaining power of the working class.
Simultaneously, banking deregulation since the “Big Bang” has assisted the transfer of wealth from the Global South to flow into London property markets. This same logic extends to housing, where financialisation via buy-to-let mortgages and asset manager monopolies that turned homes into assets rather than places to live, driving up prices and deepening scarcity. This rentier model, by design, discourages investment in maintenance and infrastructure. The consequences are not abstract: the social murder of over 72 people at the Grenfell Tower fire and of two-year-old Awaab Ishak from prolonged mould exposure are the direct results of a system that prioritises shareholder returns over human life.
Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz – a sovereign act of resistance – has provided the ruling class with a pretext to offload the cost of imperialist war onto working-class households. Even if the Memorandum of Understanding holds, a return to pre-February market conditions remains unlikely: clearing mines from the Strait, repairing damaged infrastructure, and correcting logistical blockages will take months, and the rate of inflation is unlikely to decrease.
As the ruling class scapegoats resistance to imposed war for rising energy bills, rather than the system that fuels and profits from war, we must ask: what are the implications for a transition away from fuelling militarism and imperialism? And what demands must we make when faced with the reality of this transition?
For years, the climate movement’s answers to these questions have been limited to demanding a reduced dependence on fossil fuels and a transition to renewables as a cheaper, more reliable source of energy. But a transition focused solely on fuel ignores the current relationship between energy, whatever its source, and militarism and imperialism. Oil and gas became the lifeblood of national security during the First World War. Over the following century, international corporations partnered with the US and British militaries to drive wars based on hoarding profits from natural resources monopolised by finance capital.
Today, this same logic is repeating under the guise of renewable energy. The Pentagon’s flagship project, “Pax Silica,” aims to secure supply chains for silicon and other minerals essential to semiconductor production. As the US Department of State puts it: “If the 20th century ran on oil and steel, the 21st century runs on compute and the minerals that feed it.” These are not only the materials for solar panels – they are also the materials for weapons that bomb hospitals, schools, and homes in Gaza, and computer chips that enable AI to generate thousands of targets for the US and Israeli militaries.
Another clear example with strong US and British support is the Israeli regime’s aim to produce one-third of its energy through renewables by 2030. This plan relies on the development of renewable infrastructure in the occupied West Bank, the Jawlan, and the Naqab. Meanwhile, the Israeli regime systematically denies Palestinians sovereignty over their own energy, with one of the first acts of the intensified genocide being to cut off the supply of electricity to Gaza’s power grid. Key infrastructure and improvised solutions to navigate the siege have also been explicitly targeted, such as the assassination of Imad Miqdad, an operator of a solar-powered energy point for displacement camps in Gaza. Israel’s genocidal warfare against Palestinians, Lebanese, and the people of the region will continue whether powered by renewables or fossil fuels.
A transition to renewables alone is therefore not the solution. Without an anti-imperialist revolutionary transition, a “greener” energy system is merely a new face on extraction that is still fuelled by the blood of people in West Asia and from all the countries from which the materials necessarily hail.
This continued extraction directly affects British working households. As a sub-imperialist arm of the US, Britain is exposed to the consequences of US military expenditure, which has pushed US national debt beyond 100% of its own GDP and eroded domestic social spending. At the same time, energy and utility companies have recorded over $240 billion in profits in the first five months of 2026 – 40% higher than the previous year – driven largely by investment in AI data centres that support US military operations.
The British government relies on debt markets heavily influenced by US fiscal policy, meaning that US borrowing costs feed directly into British inflation and household energy bills. British energy firms, dependent on government subsidies, pass these costs on to consumers. The result is a cycle in which working-class families pay twice: first through taxes that subsidise energy companies, and again through inflated bills that push more households into fuel poverty while corporations continue to consolidate their profits.
As long as U.S.-led imperialism and its aggression to maintain hegemonic power continue, there will never be an energy transition that benefits the British working class – no matter the mode of energy used to power our homes. Resisting fuel poverty, therefore, requires more than demanding that energy companies stop fossil fuel production.
In Energy Embargo for Palestine, we launched in the wake of the intensified genocide in Gaza, at the intersection of the climate and Palestine movements, to organise against the BP oil supply chains that fuel Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Since launching campaigns targeting BP’s institutional partnerships and working with organisations internationally to expose, map and disrupt the flow of BTC oil to Israel, we have come to understand that organising for the expropriation of BP and energy companies in Britain and asserting energy back into public control – through a revolutionary transition – is the struggle necessary in the imperial core to impose a real energy embargo. Rather than politely asking our ruling class to hold energy companies responsible or to halt a genocide they are participating in, we must do this work ourselves to build real power and leverage.
As we collectively face rising energy bills and a ruling class that profits from imposed war, we must connect our struggles – whether that is tenant unions fighting for better housing, resistance against the far-right, organising against ecological collapse – as part of a united front against imperialism and militarism, the primary drivers of our crises.
The climate movement and the wider Left must realise that a transition to renewables must go hand-in-hand with a socialist and anti-imperialist transition. Anything less is not a transition at all. To end fuel poverty, we must end imperialism.
Energy Embargo for Palestine is an anti-imperialist organisation based in Britain responding to the call from Palestinian trade unions to disrupt energy flow to Israel.
Find out more at their website.
