WHEN war breaks out between large energy companies and politicians it
provokes the wistful reaction: if only they both could lose. On this
occasion, such an outcome is not impossible.
When Ed Miliband produced his conference-pleasing pledge to freeze energy
prices for 20 months, the knee-jerk Tory reaction was to deride such
unsophisticated dirigisme as further evidence of Red Ed’s regression to
polytechnic Trotskyism.
This dismissive response was justified insofar as the energy price freeze
was yoked in tandem with a scheme for land confiscation that suggested Ed,
Son of Ralph, had successfully got in touch with his inner Robert Mugabe.
On energy prices, however, it quickly became apparent that Dave and his
sniggering cohorts, not for the first time, had badly misjudged the public
mood. Some people take the selfish view that it would be highly congenial
to see prices, rather than pensioners, frozen during the winter of 2015 and
are threatening to cast their suffrage accordingly. The Tories have
discovered that talking down to the consuming public, in the same style in
which they insisted any attempt to curb bankers’ bonuses would be
infantile and impracticable, is electorally dangerous and they are
backtracking accordingly.
The energy companies are embracing victimhood – we all know they are
struggling to keep their heads above water. That is why average annual
household bills have risen from £625 eight years ago to £1,250 today. Take
our own iconic (if Spanish-owned) ScottishPower: its profits doubled from a
breadline £350 million in 2011 to a barely sustainable £712m in 2012.
Ignacio Galán, chairman and chief executive of its owner Iberdrola, has now
warned that if its further profits are put at risk by a Miliband freeze on
prices the company may withdraw from a £15 billion investment programme.
With SSE announcing an 8.2 per cent price rise this winter, is it likely
that ScottishPower and the other four large energy companies will refrain
from following suit?
There is already a tangible benefit from this row: the elephant in the room
is now acknowledged and, for the first time, is being openly debated. The
cause of energy price inflation is not only the companies’ greed, but also
the government’s green taxes. The energy suppliers have pushed Dave into a
corner by declaring that household bills would fall by £110 overnight if
green subsidies and environmental taxes were removed from consumers’ tariffs.
That is true, as far as it goes, but it falls short of addressing the real
issue. If the Danegeld extorted from consumers to meet the demands of
climate cultists were transferred to general taxation, that would at least
reduce the incidence of paramedics defrosting grannies found inert in
unheated houses; but it would simply shift this unjustifiable burden
elsewhere by provoking tax increases.
We should not be paying these ridiculous taxes at all. Nor should we be
destroying our once peerless landscape with forests of wind turbines. The
current calculation is that £22bn in subsidies will be doled out to “green”
energy generators to pay for wind farms across the UK over the next six
years. That money will come from consumers’ bills. This is madness. Even if
public outrage forces the costs to be transferred to general taxation, that
is still insane. Two contenders – the energy giants and the political
establishment – are locked in battle, trampling the undergrowth in which
the plundered citizenry struggles for survival, unheeding of real needs and
concerns.
The political class is out of control. The rampant greed of corporations
incapable of distinguishing between capitalism and brigandage – as with the
banks – is a cynical but familiar phenomenon: such greed has been curbed in
the past and can be again. The political elite here and in Europe is
another matter. The climate lie has given the Brussels kleptocracy an
all-purpose, comprehensive pretext to bleed its electorates white. There is
a fanaticism, an irrationality, about the climate jihadists that defies
reality. It is now clear that the True Believers are determined to restrict
all energy generation to wind power.
Last week Brussels took the first step towards prohibiting shale gas
exploitation in Europe. In the words of Jos Delbeke, director-general of
the European Commission’s climate divisions: “We don’t want to copy and
paste what happened in the US. We will do things differently in Europe.”
What happened in the US was a halving of energy bills due to fracking and
allied technology. The jokers at the IPCC have weighed in, plucking another
of their notorious statistics out of the air to claim that methane,
released by fracking, is 86 times more damaging than carbon dioxide
(previously considered the most toxic compound in the universe by True
Believers) over a 20-year period. The Stone Age beckons, but will the
lights go out before we are all bankrupt? «
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