Cost of living crisis compared to Shell mega profits

by The Canary

27 May 2026

in News, UK

Reading Time: 2 mins read

Campaigners from Fossil Free London staged a protest outside a supermarket in Hackney on Sunday 24 May, to draw attention to the rising cost of living in contrast with fossil fuel corporations’ soaring profits.

The stunt involved two trolleys. One, pushed by a campaigner dressed as an oil executive, was 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. For example: “Orange juice, £1.79, up 130%”. Behind them, a banner read: “Shell profits. We pay the price”.

The protest comes as Shell’s first quarter profits jumped 115%. This is whilst UK food prices are set to rise by 50% since the start of the cost of living crisis, driven by climate and energy shocks.

Robin Wells from Fossil Free London said:

Big Oil are vultures. They prey and profit from crisis, war, and human suffering. And they pilfer from and collapse the earth systems that 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. Because whilst Shell continues to profit, we’re all paying the price. And the cost is only getting bigger.

Stu from Fuel Poverty Action said:

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.

Meanwhile, shareholders are laughing all the way to the bank, and the government is letting them get away with it. £500 of our energy bill already goes to profits, and that’s set to rise if politicians do nothing.

That’s why Fuel Poverty Action is calling on the government to Make Green Fair campaign, clamp down on energy company profiteering, and bring down our bills by passing the benefits of cheap-to-produce renewable energy back to us.

Featured image via Fossil Free London

Comments 2

D71 says:

4 weeks ago

Funny that the legacy media, which can always be relied on to celebrate gigantic profits, never ask how that doesn’t seem to translate into general prosperity, or grearer tax receipts for more govt spending (based on their ignorant belief that tax funds spending). They paint an utterly disconnected view of how this all fits together. They never mention that those profits come from extraction – from customers and employees – that it’s not new money magicked from somewhere. They also fail to mention that that profit is not the result of useful work done, because profit is always over and above the cost of any work, it’s cash for nothing that they’re celebrating, taken from others, by deceipt (because what they’re selling is worth less than its price, hence profit), coercion (monopoly or oligopoly power), or exploitation (workers have no option). The only entity that can make money is a govt, every business simply takes money from elsewhere, it’s circulation, not making. And if a company is huge and making huge profits that means it is a burden, crowding out the possible space for everyone else, and that less is being done in that space, since every pound of profit across the UK private sector represents a pound in exchange for nothing. Profit is not something to celebrate as it’s a worthless cost for every customer.

Red Brigade says:

4 weeks ago

This Green aspect is not as immediately relevant as the effect on most people. Which is eco-campaigners’ blind spot.
Its supermarket profiteering and astronomical rents that have most impact on people in the UK.

And supermarkets aren’t raising prices because of energy shocks, stop believing their bullshit!! They’re raising them because they are greedy inhuman cunts who are happy to starve people to keep extremist profiteering from basic needs. Like the Tescos CEO who just got paid eleven million quid for one year.

Too many middle class twat nimby greens despise paupers as much as the establishment do.