Shell profits, kids go hungry
Campaigners staged a protest outside a supermarket in Hackney during the bank holiday weekend to draw attention to the rising cost of living and oil and gas corporations' soaring profits. The stunt by Fossil Free London involved two trolleys: one pushed by a campaigner dressed as an oil executive and filled with sacks of money; the other was filled with placards shaped like common food items. Each placard displayed the item's current cost and the amount it has risen by over recent months. One read, "Orange juice, £1.79, up 130 per cent". Behind the trollies a banner read: "Shell profits. We pay the price." LaughingThe protest comes as Shell's first quarter profits jumped 115 per cent, as announced this month. Food prices in Britain are set to rise by 50 per cent from the beginning of the cost of living crisis, driven by climate and energy shocks. Robin Wells, from Fossil Free London, said: “Big Oil companies are vultures. They prey and profit from crisis, war, and human suffering. And they pilfer from and collapse the earth systems the give us life. "For as long as the fossil fuel industry persists, humanity's very existence is threatened, and life is all the more miserable. Shell continues to profit, and we’re all paying the price. And the cost is only getting bigger.”Stu, also from Fuel Poverty Action, added: “It is unconscionable that so many of us are going without because we can’t afford the basic energy we need for heating, eating and lighting."Shareholders are laughing all the way to the bank, and the government is letting them get away with it. And £500 of our energy bill already goes to profits, and that’s set to rise if politicians do nothing.Profits"That’s why Fuel Poverty Action is calling on the government to clamp down on energy company profiteering, and bring down our bills by passing the benefits of cheap-to-produce renewable energy back to us.”Meanwhile, some environmental campaigners have cautiously welcomed Rachel Reeves' promise to take aim at oil and gas profits, with plans to close a tax loophole on overseas activities and raise hundreds of millions of pounds.Reeves, the British chancellor, said she would stop firms – including oil and gas giants such as BP and Shell – from reducing their tax liabilities by using corporate structures involving foreign branches, in a speech last week outlining cost-of-living support measures for households and businesses.
