“La Lucha Sigue”.

The corporate oligarchs addicted to Osborne’s underhand tax breaks and 40 year future price-fixing for ‘new’ nuke won’t like it, but the reactionaries & neo-cons now setting Tory energy policy may have painted themselves into a corner. Neither our Environment Secretary who doubts man-made climate change, nor a confused Lord – and salaried gas lobbyist – who supports fracking away from his own affluent South East, may like it, but they’re increasingly isolated in their support for corporate welfare.

In Germany, though launched by the Red-Green coalitions of the late 1990s & early 2000s, its 600 local energy co-operatives are supported by the Right as much as by the Left; two CDU/CSU MPs Goeppel and Liebing convened last November’s first congress of green energy co-ops. Germany sees energy co-ops – whether controlled by individuals or municipalities – as market liberators, engines of social cohesion, lower carbon emissions and even in some cases, lower electricity prices.