El Gordo, the great provider, has seemingly rediscovered socialism.
According to the BBC he’s unveiled a £910m package of measures to help people pay for their gas and electricity without putting peoples’ bills up. Typical of the lazy-assed reporting that you see at the BBC when they’re faithfully spinning No Mandate Brown’s bullshit propaganda for him, they fail to point out that most of it is old news.
Free cavity wall and loft insulation for pensioners and poor households? That’s been available for years, even took advantage of it myself.
50% off the cost of insulation for all households? Not 100% sure on this but I think grants have been available for some time available to everyone.
Freeze on this year’s bills for half a million poor consumers? The social tariffs have been in for a couple of years now.
Partial reversal of cut to warm front programme giving free central heating to poorest pensioners? Why was it cut in the first place? The Gord giveth and the Gord taketh away. All pensioners in Scotland are entitled to free central heating.
Cold weather payments to go up from £8.50 a week to £25 a week for pensioners, disabled people and unemployed families with children under five if temperatures drop below zero for seven consecutive days. I’d be interested to know how many times this happens. My guess is, on average, roughly once ina blue moon (where does that phrase come from, incidently?).
The Goblin King says the British government aims to insulate every home in Britain (you sure about the “B” word there? Warm Front is England-only) by 2020. Will homeowners be forced to insulate their homes with penalties for those that don’t? What if you don’t have cavity walls or a loft or you are one of those people that believes filling cavity walls with insulation is a bad idea because cavity walls were invented to stop damp? Not every home can be insulated and when I had my house done, Warm Front wouldn’t pay for the floor of of a bedroom we have over the top of an alleyway to be insulated so the room is still unusable in the winter.
Now don’t worry yourself about the cost either. It’s not going to be passed on to the consumer:
I do not expect the £910m that we raise to be passed on to the consumer by the energy companies. I think that’s a very important point to make.
Oh yes Gordo, very important. New legislation is going to be passed requiring energy companies to pay for this near billion pound social spending bonanza which will take a few months at least to work its way through Parliament so just watch your gas and electric bill rocket over the coming months to compensate for the stealth windfall tax.
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Once in a blue moon, when big volcanoes do big eruptions they put so much dust in the atmosphere, the moon turns blue.
But only very big volcanoes doing only very big eruptions, so it is quite rare
Krakatoa was a good example
i think we also get more cold weather money or we get it quicker or something too. This really pisses off the people in Northumbria (one of the border counties) because a weather station in their zone was used for the calculations
I am sure you would agree Wonko, that as a stategically important sector of the economy, the energy industry should be publicly-owned… Were Brown to renationalise the gas and electricity companies and allow worker participation in management – that would be rediscovering socialism!
I don’t think that the whole energy industry should be nationalised but the state should be able to supply electricity and gas and compete with private suppliers. Worker participation in management? Some people shouldn’t be allowed to leave the house on their own, let alone take part in running a company.
I think my idea of Poor Peoples Power PLC is still a good one, if you are on the dole or poor, you can sign up to them, your power is paid for via the DWP.
The purchasing power of the government will be able to get a good deal for the exchequer and in turn bring prices down for the rest of us as those of us who have to pay real prices will be aware of what it really costs.
Discuss
State-owned buildings, street lights, road signs, etc. – they should all be supplied by a state-owned supplier. Social tariffs don’t belong with private companies, they belong with a state-owned provider. If the emphasis was on breaking even instead of making a profit then it would be able to provide cheap electricity and gas for anyone that wanted it. That, in turn, would force private companies to drop their prices. They’d have to maximise profits by cutting their costs at source. The biggest providers supply their own gas and oil through their own subsidiaries so they’d have to cut the source costs. To make a profit in that sector they’d have to start taking on cartels such as OPEC who have, incidentally just cut production again to force the price of oil back up as it’s at its lowest price since April (not that you’d know from petrol prices). It’s a win-win situation.
Oh great, just what I need – higher energy bills to compensate me for… higher energy bills.
Hmmm.
yes, so PPP plc buys 40 million cubic metres of gas from who ever they can get it from cheapest and pump it into the national grid or whatever the gas network is called.
Will the russian oligarch or the arab Sand Jocks give a damn who butys their gas, NPower or PPP plc?
In theory it will skew competion but the old people are being kept warm so who cares?
Ah wonko – “Some people shouldn’t be allowed to leave the house on their own, let alone take part in running a company.”
How does it sound if we replace “company” with “government”?
Do you believe that all citizens have a right to participate in the affairs of the nation? If so, why not in the affairs of the nation’s enterprises?
I think you will find that a blue moon appears on the eighth day after 7 consequetive days when the temperature in England and Wales remains below zero celsius. That is very, very seldom, if ever.