Imagining future events changes brain to improve healthy decision-making, new study indicates

Virginia Tech scientists at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC found practicing episodic future thinking both reduced impulsivity and enhanced connectivity in key regions of the brain

Virginia Tech

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The late Warren Bickel (left) and Stephen LaConte, both professors at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, led a study that suggests envisioning future events could be an effective behavioral therapy for alcohol use disorder. The study also documented changes in brain connectivity associated with the practice. 

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Credit: Virginia Tech

Learning to think more about specific events in the future appears to reduce impulsivity,  improve decision-making, and shows potential as a therapy for alcohol use disorder, a new Virginia Tech study found. 

The study, which involved 24 participants whose brains were scanned during both resting-state and task-based fMRI, showed brain connections were altered by future thinking.

The research, published recently in the journal Brain Connectivity, was among the last led by the late Warren Bickel, professor and director of the Addiction Recovery Research Center at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC.

Bickel, who died of cancer in September, was a leading researcher in the field of using “episodic future thinking” – the capacity to vividly imagine events that might happen in your future – to address addiction.

“What we were trying to understand was how episodic future thinking works as a kind of therapeutic approach,” said Stephen LaConte, professor and corresponding author on the paper. “What we found is that training people to think more about their future changed the extent to which they value immediate rewards over those in the future, and we’re seeing related changes in connectivity in key regions of the brain along with that.”

The Fralin Biomedical Research Institute study is the first in which participants practiced imagining specific, personal future events in the lab before returning to those thoughts during an MRI brain scan to identify brain activity changes. 

For example, a subject might think, “In one year, I will be opening my first art gallery in Los Angeles,” along with details of the sights, sounds, and feelings of the gallery opening.

Alcohol use disorder is characterized in part by an impaired ability to think clearly about the future and a tendency toward impulsive decision making. The phenomenon is called delay discounting, or valuing delayed rewards less than immediate ones.

Previous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of episodic future thinking in reducing delay discounting and promoting making healthier choices, and it’s emerging as a potential behavioral intervention for substance use disorders. 

Participants exhibited reduced impulsivity in their decision-making, and greater ease at more challenging tasks in deciding between immediate and delayed rewards. At the same time, the scientists noticed increased connection between multiple regions of the brain called the salience network.

“We found that in the delayed discounting tasks, people who had this higher functional connectivity actually were able to perform the hard tasks more quickly,” said LaConte, who is also interim co-director of the Addiction Recovery Research Center. “What that means is that either the episodic future thinking is making the tasks easier, or it’s freeing up some brain resources and temporarily changing their delay discounting. We don’t yet know which.”

The study provides a baseline for future research, said Jeremy Myslowski, the paper’s first author.

“We see this as a fruitful opportunity to examine potential changes in brain connectivity by collecting data both before and after the intervention,” said Myslowski, a doctoral candidate in LaConte’s lab when he worked on the study. He has since graduated. “And when we move into performing work with a real-world alcohol consumption component, we have something tangible in the brain data to point to.”

Further research is needed to determine how long-lasting the behavioral and connectivity changes are. 

LaConte noted that the results closely mirrored a 2020 study of brain connectivity in people receiving antidepressants for the first time, which bolstered the idea that episodic future thinking could be a valuable early intervention therapy, and the brain connectivity the study documented could be a useful marker for success in evaluating therapies for psychiatric diseases. 

LaConte and Bickel were longtime collaborators at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute. Bickel was among the first to recognize the importance of episodic future thinking in understanding and treating substance use disorders. 

 

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Journal

Brain Connectivity

DOI

10.1089/brain.2024.0025 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Connectivity Changes Following Episodic Future Thinking in Alcohol Use Disorder

 

Long-term cocaine use may increase impulsivity

While being more impulsive does not necessarily escalate cocaine use, long-term cocaine use may increase impulsivity in otherwise healthy rats.

Society for Neuroscience

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This schematic depicts the delay-discounting task used to measure impulsivity level. Rats chose either a small reward delivered with no delay or a large reward available with a delay of up to 60 seconds.

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Credit: Shen et al., eNeuro 2025

Researchers have widely accepted that impulsivity increases the risk of drug addiction, but the evidence to support this belief is mixed. Exploring the relationship between impulsivity and cocaine use in rats, Yihong Yang and colleagues from the National Institute on Drug Abuse found evidence that contradicts the prevailing view that high impulsivity predicts cocaine use.  

One classification of impulsivity is impulsive choice, which can be studied with risky choice tasks and delay-discounting tasks (DDT). During DDT, impulsive individuals prefer smaller, immediate rewards over larger, delayed ones. In this eNeuro study, the researchers used DDT to categorize how impulsive rats were compared to their peers. After being classified by impulsivity level, the rats went through a cocaine self-administration paradigm; researchers can measure addiction-like behavior by continued cocaine use despite the known presence of unpleasant consequences—foot shocks, in this case. In addition to finding that impulsivity levels did not influence cocaine use, the researchers were surprised to discover that long-term cocaine use increased impulsivity in rats previously considered less impulsive than their peers. Brain imaging and other assessments revealed that rats with cocaine-driven impulsivity had fewer dopamine receptors and weaker communication between brain regions in a reward-related network. According to the authors, these findings advance our understanding of complex drug–brain circuit interactions and how they influence behavior. 

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Please contact media@sfn.org for the full-text PDF.

About eNeuro

eNeuro is an online, open-access journal published by the Society for Neuroscience. Established in 2014, eNeuro publishes a wide variety of content, including research articles, short reports, reviews, commentaries and opinions.

About The Society for Neuroscience

The Society for Neuroscience is the world's largest organization of scientists and physicians devoted to understanding the brain and nervous system. The nonprofit organization, founded in 1969, now has nearly 35,000 members in more than 95 countries.

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Journal

eNeuro

DOI

10.1523/ENEURO.0408-24.2025 

Article Title

Cocaine Self-Administration Increases Impulsive Decision-Making in Low-Impulsive Rats Associated with Impaired Functional Connectivity in the Mesocorticolimbic System

Article Publication Date

3-Mar-2025

Novel research shows brain connections can predict future substance use in adolescents

Insights from a new study published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging can play an important role in early prevention and intervention

Elsevier

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A. Seed region: dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC). B. Whole-brain regression analysis reveals an association between higher dACC-dlPFC connectivity at Time 1 and a delayed age of first substance use. C. Orange data points show the trajectory of dACC-dlPFC connectivity before substance use onset, with a decline observed one year prior. Gray data points represent dACC-dlPFC connectivity at and after substance use onset. Error bars indicate the standard error.

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Credit: Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, Chen et al.

Philadelphia, March 3, 2025 – Adolescent substance use is a significant predictor of future addiction and related disorders. Understanding neural mechanisms underlying substance use initiation and frequency during adolescence is critical for early prevention and intervention. A novel study in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, published by Elsevier, shows that by tracking year-to-year changes in brain connectivity underlying cognitive control, the ability to flexibly use goals to guide behavior and overcome habitual responses, data can predict when an adolescent is at high risk of starting to use substances, an important message for early prevention.

Lead investigator Jungmeen Kim-Spoon, PhD, Department of Psychology and School of Neuroscience, Virginia Tech, says, "Beginning to use substances at a young age can significantly increase the risk of developing serious substance use problems later in life. This may lead to major challenges in relationships, work, and overall well-being. By identifying the risk of early substance use, we can improve our chances of preventing it and helping individuals avoid these challenges.”

To clarify brain mechanisms that prospectively predict initiation and progression of substance use, the current study examined the trajectories of functional connectivity during cognitive control linked to substance use. For seven years researchers followed 91 adolescents from ages 14 to 21 who had never used substances at the start of this longitudinal study to identify potential neural precursors that predict substance use initiation and frequency. Cognitive control processes were examined using the Multi-Source Interference Task (MSIT) to assess functional neural connectivity; a questionnaire assessed substance use frequency.

Findings indicate that brain connectivity related to cognitive control predicted substance use initiation, whereas cognitive control behavior did not.

Co-investigator Tae-Ho Lee, PhD, Department of Psychology and School of Neuroscience, Virginia Tech, explains, "Our study revealed that neural recruitment from the salience network (brain regions for detecting and responding to stimuli) during the cognitive control process, specifically the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and anterior insula (aINS), can predict future substance use in adolescents before they actually begin using substances."

Co-investigator Ya-Yun Chen, MS, Department of Psychology, Virginia Tech, adds, "Specifically, stronger connectivity between the dACC and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was associated with delayed substance use onset, and this connectivity pattern showed a significant drop one year prior to substance use initiation. In contrast, lower connectivity of the dACC with the supplementary motor area, along with heightened connectivity of the aINS with the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex and angular gyrus, predicted greater severity of future substance use."

Editor-in-Chief of Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging Cameron S. Carter, MD, University of California Irvine, comments, "Adolescence is an important period characterized by heightened susceptibility to risk-taking behaviors, which have implications for substance use. National data indicate that approximately 68% of individuals aged 12 to 17 in the United States reported initiating the use of substances such as cigarettes, alcohol, or marijuana in the past year. In light of these statistics, identifying neurodevelopmental precursors linked to the risk of early substance use and heavy use during adolescence becomes crucial. The current study paves the way for innovative early prevention and intervention strategies."

Dr. Kim-Spoon concludes, "Our study highlights the critical role of cognitive control-related neural connectivity in forecasting substance use initiation and frequency during adolescence. The results imply that efforts to strengthen and monitor the development of the top-down cognitive control system in the brain from early adolescence may serve as a protective factor, helping to deter progression into problematic substance use. Furthermore, for adolescents with heightened frequency of substance use, interventions may be more effective if they target interoceptive processes as part of cognitive control training."

 

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Journal

Biological Psychiatry Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging

DOI

10.1016/j.bpsc.2024.11.020 

Method of Research

Imaging analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Neural Signatures of Cognitive Control Predict Future Adolescent Substance Use Onset and Frequency

COI Statement

The authors’ affiliations and disclosures of financial and conflicts of interest are available in the article. Cameron S. Carter, MD, is Chair of the Department of Psychiatry & Human Behavior at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine. His disclosures of financial and conflicts of interest are available https://www.biologicalpsychiatrycnni.org/bpsc-editorial-disclosures.

Turning plastic waste into valuable resources: A new photocatalytic approach

Higher Education Press

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 (a) Detailed schematic representation of the PEC degradation mechanism employed for PS waste using a WO3 photoanode. (b) Quantified hydrogen and carbon dioxide production from the PS-coated WO3 system, as related to the experimental conditions described in the corresponding part of the text, over a duration of 4 h. ppm: parts per million.

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Credit: Love Kumar Dhandole et al.

A recent study published in Engineering presents an innovative strategy for converting plastic waste into useful products. The research, led by a team of scientists from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) and other institutions, focuses on polystyrene (PS), a commonly used plastic that poses significant challenges for waste management.

Plastic pollution has become a pressing environmental issue due to the increasing production and improper disposal of plastic products. PS, in particular, is difficult to degrade naturally and often ends up in landfills or the environment, contributing to the spread of microplastics. Current methods for treating PS waste, such as pyrolysis and chemical oxidation, are energy-intensive and may have negative environmental impacts.

The new approach developed by the researchers involves a photoelectrochemical (PEC) system using a porous tungsten oxide (WO3) photoanode. The key to this method is leveraging the solubility of PS in organic solvents like acetone and chloroform. By dissolving PS in chloroform and using a dip-coating technique, the researchers were able to deposit PS onto the porous WO3 photoanode, ensuring intimate contact between the plastic and the photocatalyst.

The porous structure of the WO3 photoanode, prepared via electrochemical anodization, provides several advantages. It enhances the interaction between the electrolyte and the photoanode, facilitating efficient PEC reactions. Under sunlight illumination, the photogenerated holes in the WO3 photoanode are transferred to the PS, promoting its oxidative degradation. The anodic oxidation of PS generates carbon dioxide, while hydrogen gas is produced at the cathode through water reduction.

The researchers characterized the materials and the PEC performance using various techniques, including transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). These analyses confirmed the successful deposition of PS on the WO3 photoanode and provided insights into the charge-transfer dynamics and reaction mechanisms.

However, the study also identified some limitations. Complete degradation of PS was not achieved due to PS detachment from the electrode, which was exacerbated by the generation of oxygen bubbles during the PEC process. Despite this, the researchers believe that the detached PS flakes could be separated and redeposited for further treatment.

This research represents a significant step forward in the development of sustainable plastic waste treatment technologies. By converting PS waste into valuable products like hydrogen and benzyl alcohol, the proposed PEC strategy offers a promising solution for waste management and resource recovery. Future studies will focus on optimizing the PEC process, exploring alternative semiconducting materials, and scaling up the technology for practical applications.

The paper “Turning Waste into Valuable Products: Sunlight-Driven Hydrogen from Polystyrene via Porous Tungsten Oxide Photoanodes,” authored by Love Kumar Dhandole, Jun-Tae Kim, Hyoung-il Kim, Sang Hoon Kim, Ji-Young Kim, Jonghun Lim, Gun-hee Moon. Full text of the open access paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eng.2024.12.009. For more information about the Engineering, follow us on X (https://twitter.com/EngineeringJrnl) & like us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/EngineeringJrnl).

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Journal

Engineering

DOI

10.1016/j.eng.2024.12.009 

Article Title

Turning Waste into Valuable Products: Sunlight-Driven Hydrogen from Polystyrene via Porous Tungsten Oxide Photoanodes

UK Households will pay over £3,000 more for energy since winter 2020/21 as Ofgem rises price cap over 6%

 

HubMP2012

FEBRUARY 25, 2025

Ofgem has announced the energy price cap for April to June is now set to rise by 6.4% from current levels meaning an average annual bill of £1,849 for households paying by direct debit.

This means the average household is set to pay around £750 more per year for their energy compared to winter 2020/21 – a 77% increase. 

The Ofgem price cap means that energy firms should not charge more than the set rate for unit rates and daily standing charges for those on standard variable tariffs. The cost of every unit of gas used will surge by over 10%, meaning the cost of gas is now double what it was in winter 2020/21. 

Every unit of electricity will go up almost 9%. Around 40% of the time the cost of electricity is also driven by the price of gas due to the country’s energy system.

Also included in the small print is a clause that will allow energy suppliers to increase the profits made on every customer’s bill by 4.1%, compared to the current quarter. The wider energy industry has already made £483bn in profit over the course of the energy bills crisis.

Taking into account price changes and government support over time, the total extra cost that the average household has had to find for their energy will reach £3,039 by the end of June 2025.

Simon Francis, coordinator of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition, commented: “The soaring cost of gas is driving the current spike in energy bills and the only way out of the problem is to continue drives to improve our energy security and for the Chancellor to announce a £13.2bn, fully-funded, Warm Homes Plan in the Comprehensive Spending Review. But alongside the transition away from reliance on gas, it’s crucial to provide support for vulnerable households struggling with energy costs now.

“The big question will be how do we pay for these improvements in support. Both Warm Home Discounts and debt relief are traditionally funded through our energy bills. Yet the energy industry makes billions of pounds in profit every year and it beggars belief that Ofgem is increasing the profit allowance for suppliers in the current climate.”

Caroline Simpson, Warm This Winter campaign manager, commented: “Yet another price cap rise is devastating news. But bill payers need to know it is caused because global gas prices are soaring due to factors outside of our control and profiteering energy giants such as Centrica and Norwegian-owned Equinor, the biggest supplier of gas to the UK, who make billions of pounds each year out of our misery.

“It is therefore crucial that the government presses on with plans to fix this broken system and boost our energy security by rapidly increasing our supply of homegrown clean energy to free us from expensive gas and bring down bills for everyone for good.

“This must come alongside reform of electricity markets, investment in energy efficiency in our homes and financial support with the cost of energy for the most vulnerable households.”

James Watson-O’Neill, Chief Executive of the national disability charity Sense, said: “Yet another increase in the energy price cap – the third in a row – will dismay many disabled people.

“Disabled households are telling us they’re living in crisis. The need to power crucial equipment, such as feeding machines and hoists, means many disabled people have no choice but to use extra energy. Our research clearly shows that many disabled people with complex needs are already struggling to afford their energy bills, with more than two in five telling us they can’t afford to keep their home warm enough.

“There is no end in sight and disabled people cannot be left waiting any longer for targeted help with their energy bills. We need the government to urgently implement a social energy tariff, to help level the playing field for those who rely on energy-intensive equipment.”

Former Shadow Justice Secretary Richard Burgon MP tweeted: “The so-called energy regulator Ofgem says energy bills from April will rise by 6.4% The Government must step in and impose a real price cap and tax energy profits more to provide extra help to people. And to end this rip off, we must bring energy back into public ownership.”

Lambeth Labour councillor Martin Abrams pointed out: “In opposition Sir Keir Starmer promised to ‘freeze energy bills’. As Prime Minister he is allowing Big Energy Companies to increase bills by more than twice the rate of inflation.”

Excessive profits

Last week Centrica announced annual profits of more than £1.5bn. They come from across the company, including making £269m from households directly through its British Gas supplier arm and £307m from its market trading division which profits from trading in volatile oil and gas prices. This means that since 2020 Centrica has now posted almost £9bn in operating profits – the equivalent of £310 per household.

Warm This Winter spokesperson Caroline Simpson said: “We need to get away from energy bills driven by the gas industry which has netted just 20 profiteering companies like British Gas more than £483 billion since 2020. Our bills are high because of greedy gas and oil companies who are making billions which is why reducing energy use through better insulation and developing our own energy sources is the only way to achieve lower prices and energy security for good.”

On Thursday, Citizens Advice published a report about energy network companies making excessive profits from the cost-of-living crisis due a loophole in the Ofgem rules. Energy network owners made £3.9bn ‘excess profit’ from higher bills, the report says.

Cat Hobbs, Director of We Own It, said the findings were “outrageous”, tweeting: “Energy transmission and distribution is a natural monopoly and other countries recognise this – PUBLIC OWNERSHIP NOW.”

Labour peer Prem Sikka pointed out that “Ofgem’s marginal pricing rules guarantee profits to the most inefficient/costly producer,” adding that “one in five of all deaths are people in fuel poverty – including 110,000 pensioners. Yet [there are] no curbs on profiteering.”

Simon Francis, coordinator of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition, commented: “We have been warning Ofgem about the charges we pay to these firms and the profits they make for well over a year now. But these firms have a virtual monopoly over vital grid infrastructure and have consumers over a barrel. That’s why it is so important for the regulator to do its job.

“Our own data suggest that the group-level profits made by these firms run to the tens of billions and are part of a wider energy industry that has made over £483bn profits during the energy bills crisis. These excesses, along with our reliance on volatile fossil gas prices, market flaws and our leaky housing stock are why energy bills remain at such high levels.”

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cj_collective/6992454230 climatejusticecollective Licence: Attribution 2.0 Generic Deed CC BY 2.0

How the left came back to life

FEBRUARY  26, 2025

Michael Chessum introduces the new, expanded paperback edition of his book This is Only the Beginning.

Every thirty years – Bevanism, Bennism, Corbynism – a tide has drawn the left into the Labour Party, replenishing the activist base of the Labour left and giving millions of people hope of genuine mainstream political representation. 

There may not be another. Even after the 1980s, the left was viewed as a part of Labour’s broad church. Now, we are viewed – both by the Labour right’s apparatchiks and their media allies – as an existential threat and as a direct competitor for jobs and influence. The pendulum may swing to Blairite excess, the assumption goes, but an Ed Miliband usually follows. That can’t happen unless a critical mass of the Party establishment lets it. 

On the left, Corbynism permanently raised the expectations of its hundreds of thousands of activists, and many millions of supporters. Even if the pendulum swings back, that mass of people will not be satisfied by the prospect of a soft left Labour leader sometime in the 2030s. They are right to be impatient, because the climate crisis cannot wait and neither can the task of building an alternative to the far right. A leftward shift taking place among Britain’s under-40s also means that the electoral space to Starmer’s left is now massive. 

Corbynism was the most extreme of Labour’s tides. While a small core of existing Labour activists were key to its success, the project’s support base was built almost entirely outside the Party. In 2015, the activists of the anti-austerity movement, the anti-war movement and a million other struggles came together. Most had been defeated on their own terms, but had marched on in the hope of building a left political alternative. Crucial to their success was a new generation of activists, whose radicalisation was embodied in the student revolt of late 2010. 

This Is Only The Beginning is the story of how the left came back to life in the 2010s – of how these threads came together, what happened to them and what we need to do now. So many of the histories of the Corbyn moment and the recent British left have, despite the wide worldviews of their authors, placed an overwhelming focus on court histories. Just as the new Labour left political method became increasingly elitist (its activists were entrusted largely with door-knocking rather than setting policy) so many histories of the project suck all the agency upwards. 

I hope that this book does something different, by focusing, not on decisions taken by plucky aides or deals hammered out in smoky back rooms, but on the mass movements that actually built Corbynism. In the absence of the left’s grown-ups – its failing institutions and technocrats – it was left to hundreds of thousands of young people, radical retirees, public sector workers, benefit claimants, squatters, weirdos, precarious migrant workers, single mums and concerned citizens to throw themselves at the austerity consensus in the hope that it might break. It is from them, not the left’s celebrities and icons, that we should draw our inspiration.

The central argument of the book is that the mass movements that preceded Corbynism created the conditions for a new left – pluralistic, democratically-minded and rooted in social and industrial struggle. But these movements took form in a period in which the organised left was weak, and most were defeated years before Corbynism took shape. As a result, this new left lacked coherence. So the new left was sucked into the Labour Party and flipped on its head. Where once the British left had struck and marched without political representation, the years between 2015 and 2019 would be directed almost exclusively towards electoralism. 

At the heart of this new left was the ‘generation without a history’ (the theme of Chapter 2). The radicalising youth of the early 2010s were born into the end of history, and the explosive student revolt (Chapter 1) was a crucial moment in the shattering of the wider neoliberal consensus. The crucial characteristic of this generation was that it was cut off from the traditions of the organised left by the defeats of the 1980s and 1990s. A left activist coming of age in previous generations would have found themselves surrounded by an ecosystem; an activist coming of age in 2010 or 2011 found themselves in what seemed like a desert. 

This lack of historical mooring gave millennials a sense of intense creativity. The occupation of Millbank Tower, which kicked off the student movement (and to an extent the wider anti-austerity movement) in November 2010 was as much as anything an act of collective imagination, inspired by a disconnection to the past. Across the generations, the 2010s were an era in which the historical playbook didn’t work; and in which leaps of faith and suspensions of disbelief were vindicated. As one Generation X anarchist activist told me: “If you’d said to me ten years earlier that I was going to be in the Labour Party, I would have told you to stop smoking crack”. 

But the same thing that gave the movements their dynamism also made them vulnerable. The Labour left was tiny in 2015, and the veterans of the social and industrial struggles – young and old – ranged from being sceptical of the Party to actively hostile towards it. My generation was never ‘in and against’ the Labour Party. It was first against the Labour Party and then just in it. 

As a result, what started as a bid for ‘a new kind of politics’ rapidly became a conventional Labourist project. Corbynites focused on elections – internal and external – to the exclusion of building social or industrial power, and the project was led from above with very little internal democratic life. The lack of an empowered grassroots was not an accident, but the result of a series of conscious decisions. I use Chapters 5 and 6 to set these out in detail – from the shutting down of Momentum’s internal democracy, to the sabotaging of open selections and the failure to allow members to set party policy. 

I joined the Labour Party in 2012. I remain a member, and I have no immediate plans to leave. There is an important job to be done inside the Party, whatever one’s perspective on the projects that exist outside. But my perspective on Labour has shifted – not because of Starmer’s many betrayals, but because of the experience of Corbynism. 

If you want to know how, read the book. 

This is Only the Beginning: The Making of a New Left, From Anti-Austerity to the Fall of Corbyn is published by Bloomsbury. The paperback edition, released this year, contains a new chapter covering the cost of living crisis, as well as a new conclusion. 

 UK

Which side are they on?

HubMP2012

FEBRUARY 26, 2025

It’s time for Labour to get off the sidelines and tackle inflation, argues Fran Heathcote.

Fran Heathcote is General Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union.

In December the Prime Minister said the test of his Government would be whether it boosted living standards.

Today, Ofgem has announced energy bills would rise by another 6.4% in April – which follows a 10% hike in October and a 1.2% rise in January, meaning that energy bill have risen by over 18% since Labour was elected.

And it’s not just energy bills either, water companies have been allowed to hike annual water bills by as much as 47% from April. Imagine the outrage in the press if hard-pressed public sector workers demanded an increase of that magnitude – and our members aren’t dumping raw sewage in rivers and seas!

If Keir Starmer wants to understand why his poll ratings are tanking, he needs to look no further than the household finances of millions of people struggling to make ends meet.

He could simply walk along Whitehall and speak to some of the security guards and cleaners working for his ministers who are paid the minimum wage with no access to company sick pay. They have been taking strike action to demand better.

Overall inflation is now rising by 3%, but private rents are up by 8.7% on average across the UK (and more in many cities: for example, 11% in London), while food price inflation is 3.3%. Many workers who have just cobbled together enough to get a mortgage are facing huge hikes in their costs as interest rates have remained high since the disastrous mini-Budget of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.

In December, the Government recommended a pay rise of 2.8% for millions of public sector workers for 2025/26, but since then inflation has risen to 3% and the Bank of England forecasts it will rise further to 3.7% later this year.

So far, Government ministers have twiddled their thumbs while energy corporations, water companies, landlords and banks have profiteered at the expense of working class people. People are fed up with being ripped off.

The Government can no longer sit back. It needs to tackle an active, interventionist approach on the side of working class people.

In February, IPSA proposed that MPs’ pay would rise by 2.8% in April. That’s below inflation, but a lot more than the 1.7% increase the very poorest people in our society will be getting in benefits increase.

That’s because annual benefit increases are set by the inflation rate in September, even though the uprating doesn’t take effect until the following April. So the very poorest people in our society – many living in poverty, some in destitution – get a 1.7% increase even though their living costs are rising by 3% or more.

In cash terms, the figures are even more stark: an MP currently receiving £91,346 would see their annual pay rise by over £210 per month more; a 1.7% increase in the basic allowance of Universal Credit equates to just an extra £7 per month.

It is PCS members, working in jobcentres, who work with Universal Credit claimants and know just how desperate life is for people struggling on our paltry and unnecessarily punitive benefits system.

It is ridiculous to suggest that the richest in our society and the profiteering corporations cannot afford to pay a bit more tax to fund better social security and a decent pay rise for the lowest earners.

This Labour government will no doubt get unfair criticism from the right wing press, but it needs to listen to its core working class voter base.

Stop mugging pensioners and letting energy companies hike bills every three months; stop imposing real terms cuts on public sector workers while refusing to hike taxes on the richest; and don’t condemn people into deeper poverty and cut local housing allowance while landlords profiteer.

You can’t get economic growth without boosting the incomes of working class people. If the Government fails to cap prices, people will rightly demand higher wage and benefit settlements.

Image: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fran_Heathcote_%28PCS%29,_Tolpuddle_Martyrs%27_Festival_2024.jpg Author: DimiTalen, licensed  under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.