Vive la revoilution?

As the nights draw in and the mornings become ever crisper, thoughts will turn inevitably to the heating of homes over the cold winter months.

Over the last few years innumerable schemes have been rolled out to help those on low incomes better heat their homes. Free or discounted insulation and energy efficient heating systems have been offered to tenants and homeowners alike, but still, as we revealed in last month’s look at fuel poverty, over a million UK households remain fuel poor while energy prices soar.

Step forward London mayor Ken Livingstone, with perhaps the unlikeliest cheap fuel scheme to date. In a deal with the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, London is to receive cheap oil from the resource-rich South American nation in return for consultancy services from London experts to improve transport, planning and housing provision in the capital Caracas. The deal also includes an undertaking by the mayor’s office to promote Venezuala as a tourist destination, and generally push its profile in the capital.

Comrades-in-arms Chavez and Livingstone say the oil, which will come from part Venezualan owned refineries here in the UK, will be used to provide cheap heating oil to the needy, as well as possibly being used to fund cheaper public transport in the capital. Said Chavez on his recent visit: “We have investments here in two refineries in the UK, maybe we could use these refineries to help in some way the most needy people here in London, above all in winter when the prices go up and there could be people that can’t pay when the temperatures go down.”

Chavez, of course, is rarely far from controversy in the West, and his flowery assaults on the bastions of Western capitalism – describing Tony Blair as “Hitler’s main ally” and recently referring to the lingering, sulphurous stench of the devil in a hall where George Bush had previously spoken – have hardly endeared him to the political mainstream. His increasing nationalisation of Venezuelan crude resources and support for the bïte-noir Cuban regime, meanwhile, has made him a longstanding target of US anger.

It’s not entirely surprising, then, to find opposition to the deal among the corridors of London politics, with many assuming the arrangement is little more than a publicity stunt to allow the pair to thumb their collective nose at Tony Blair, and by implication his friends in the Whitehouse. It is perhaps worth remembering that ‘Red Ken’ has already completed the ultimate nose-thumbing exercise by quitting the Labour party following Downing Street’s snub to his mayoral candidacy, only to win mayoral election as an independent.

Downing Street has maintained silence surrounding Chavez’s visit, simply issuing a statement to the effect that this was not an official visit and it doesn’t comment on private ones. Plenty of others have been happy to condemn the scheme, However. Angie Bray, leader of the London Assembly Tories dismissed the scheme as “a socialist propaganda fest,” adding: “(they) should be ashamed of themselves for even contemplating such a proposal.” Mike Tuffey, London’s Liberal Democrat leader weighed in too: “This reduces us to the status of a third-world bartering economy,” he stormed. “We should be weaning ourselves off fossil fuels, not trying to get them at subsidised prices from Venezuela.”

Clearly, one’s own location on the political spectrum is likely to influence interpretation. With little in the way of concrete plans in the public domain it’s hard to give too educated a critique. What cannot be denied is that a similar scheme which Chavez launched in the US last year brought estimated savings of $4 million to 8,000 Bronx households and has seen heating oil sold at 45 per cent of market value to the poor, and distributed free to homeless shelters, across seven US states.

Mark Weisbrot, of the US centre for Economic Policy Research, notes that for many years Venezuela has provided cheap oil to South American countries as part of its policy to protect the poor from inflated fuel prices, adding: “They don’t have a problem with the American people; it’s just the Bush administration that they don’t like.” Politics aside, if the scheme proves that it can genuinely bring relief to those that suffer and even die in freezing conditions each winter, that can only be a good thing, and it would be a brave politician who would criticize too loudly.