Just been treated to Nicky Campbell talking to Ed Davey about energy companies in relation to the Energy and Climate Change Committee’s highly political statement that the companies are not doing enough to make company profits transparent.
Campbell fully accepted that statement and didn’t challenge it in the slightest and only wheeled in Ed Davey to confirm the statement and back it up with yet more government waffle.
Not a hint that prices have risen enormously because of the government’s green taxes….probably because the ball was set rolling by Ed Miliband and his legal requirement to reduce CO2 by 80% by 2050….and of course the BBC supports that line of thinking.
Not a hint that this might be a politicised response to the energy companies recent statements that it is government taxes that are raisng prices inordinately.
The real question about transparency is just how much extra tax burden is loaded onto consumers by those government green taxes? Just how many people are forced into fuel poverty by that, just how many died because they couldn’t afford to heat their homes…having to choose…as the BBC so often likes to state in other contexts…between eating and heating?
So yet again the BBC covers up the adverse side effects of green policy….all those green BBC pension funds must be kept solvent ….and covers up for Labour’s Leader just as it did over his ‘Unite scandal’…..refusing to be ‘transparent’ about his knowledge and cooperation with Unite’s vote rigging.
Oh look…here is the ECCC’s summary….the first paragraph:
Rising energy prices are a worry for households across the UK. Since 2007 average prices of gas and electricity have risen by 41% and 20% in the UK in real terms, according to DECC. This has had an adverse impact on fuel poor households and thrown Government targets to eliminate the problem by 2016 off-course.
The main driver behind energy price rises has been wholesale gas and electricity costs, but network charges, energy and climate change policies, and company costs and profits also contribute. In future, DECC estimates that its energy and climate change policies will add 33% to the average electricity price paid by UK households in 2020, in addition to any potential wholesale price rises.
The Government must not forget that rising prices are exacerbating fuel poverty.
Energy is becoming increasingly unaffordable for low-income families living in poorly insulated and inefficient homes. Yet just as the situation for the most vulnerable is worsening, it appears that fuel poverty policy has effectively been frozen. Spending on the problem has been cut in England and some of the Government’s fuel poverty programmes appear to be in hiatus.
Ministers have been unacceptably slow to respond to the Hills Review and take action to stem the problem. It is imperative that the Government’s new fuel poverty strategy, expected at the end of this year, is not delayed any further. It should be published and implemented as an urgent priority.
Note that ‘ In future, DECC estimates that its energy and climate change policies will add 33% to the average electricity price paid by UK households in 2020.’
Note that ‘urgent priority’ for the government to get on with dealing with fuel poverty…and yet the BBC concentrates on company profits.
Odd how the BBC highlight the bit about company profits, especially as prices are driven up mainly by wholesale prices and not increasing profit margins, but sidelines the bit about fuel poverty caused by government green policies.
Here the BBC’s web report….note the small bit tagged on at the bottom:
Fuel poverty
The Energy and Climate Change Committee also reprimanded the government for not doing enough to help low-income families struggling with fuel poverty.
The committee argued that the use of levies on fuel bills to raise funds for social and environmental programmes could end up hitting those on low incomes
The BBC misses out the bit about government failures on tackling fuel poverty and the urgent priority to do so.
Angela Knight, earlier on Today really had Evan in knots. She defended (her job anyway) the energy companies right and need to make a profit. Evan was poorly briefed and was crushed by the lady!!!
Very amusing indeed. Davis was briefed alright, but on the wrong foot. He had an agenda, and it was a non-starter. Tough. I noticed Knight had to inform the audience of important points from the report Davis left out of his opening salvo. Is the complaint about transparency, or profit? Or is the demand for more “transparency” another way of highlighting about evil profits?
“No one was disputing” that the report criticized profits, eh, Evan? You sure were using that report to criticize the profits on generation. Is the BBC now going to start deciding how much profit companies are allowed to make? A quasi-Marxist value of labour again.
Did you see Ed Davey on the Andrew Neil show some Sundays ago? There man must be mad. Such sensless ‘Auto-Speak’. The UK produces less than 2% of the CO2 that is emitted in to the atmosphere. Even if global warming was due to CO2, our contribution could not be assessed if we stopped emitting it altogether.
Sorry to be pedantic, BUT
Humans produce 4% of the CO2 released annually. The UK produces 2% of the CO2 that humans release, thus our contribution to global CO2 is 0.008%. So if little Ed is right and we cut our CO2 by 50%, that will make about zero difference to the world. Especially because it has been proven that doubling the CO2 does not increase temperatures, it just makes plants grow faster. Total scam.
The waffle is all very well but at the core is that the Government and the last apology for one are in the main to blame. They all supported that most stupid of ideas, the Climate Change Act. It has no purpose whatsoever except to kill this Country and drive the People into poverty. In short, it is a suicide note for Country and People. Puny man, smart arse or not,, cannot change or control the climate, end of! The climate will change whatever man does or neglects to do. The whole thing is a lie dreamed up by airheads, some to make money, others just to show their hatred for mankind.
But in fairness to winmills (sorry turbines) they do serve the very real purpose of reminding us (in the unlikely event we forget) just how utterly utterly ridiculous our political class is.
I noticed that on TV this morning that the BBC questioner, it may have the gorgeous pouting Susannah Reed on Breakfast, asserted that the power companies were making vast profits ‘on the backs’ of the customers bills. That’s a politically loaded phrase and goes beyond reasonable questioning. They no doubt spend a lot of time reading revolutionary literature about how the evil aristos made their money from the backs of the workers.
How many Marxists in the BBC?
Yes it was her . But did you notice how quickly they moved on when green taxes on fuel bills were mentioned .
The same angle Evan Davis took on Today? A completely different programme in a completely different department of the BBC? Imagine that.
A reminder that the BBC censored the bit from Mervyn King’s statement earlier this year where he blamed green energy policies for the rise in prices, harming the poorest and most vulnerable.
Same approach to the issue, months apart, in a completely different department of the BBC. Institutional bias? What institutional bias?
These BBC School of Journalism presenters, on their £90k a year for looking seriously to camera. No evil profits being made, but what would be a massive loss in a broadcasting free market, concealed by the compulsory license fee, which falls hardest on the shoulders of the working poor.
The licence “fee” is a highly regressive tax – the sort of thing the liberal BBC would normally see as iniquitous – obviously not if they are the beneficiaries.
“The green taxes that Britain can’t afford”
By DAILY MAIL COMMENT.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2380555/The-green-taxes-Britain-afford.html