No. Actually I have been reading the Telegraph. Historically both parties have been as bad as each other. At least now though one party is willing to give the British people a say over whether they wish to remain part of the EU.

Regarding David Cameron personally, although I have many ideological differences with him it is completely unfair to refer to him as an overgrown schoolboy. Under this Liberal Conservative coalition government this country is a better place now than it was in 2010 - crime is down, immigration is down, the economy is growing, taxes are down, investment in infrastructure is up, the number of speed cameras is down, the deficit is smaller, job creation is up, education standards are improving for the first time in 40 years - and for me personally I am able to better reap the benefits of the fruits of my labour.

The test of a good government is whether it leaves office with the country in a better shape than when it entered into office. The Attlee government, the subsequent Tory governments in the 50s/early 60s, the Thatcher government and this Coalition government (assuming it breaks up in 2015) have all achieved it. Credit should be given to Clegg and Cameron - they have proven far more capable in leading this country than Major, Blair or Brown.

That may be so on your planet, but you should try ours.

Call me cynical, or call me a realist, but I think I'll have drawn my last breath looooong before this fabled referendum ever sees the light of day and even if it does and if the vote is a resounding "get out" then nothing will be done other than a feeble attempt to renegotiate terms of staying in.

Its a vote catcher to claw back attention from UKIP and appease the male readers of the Daily Fail while their wives look at thin naked women with highlighted cellulose on the sidebar, which one are you ?

No conservative should step into the argument.

VAT on domestic fuel was introduced by Norman Lamont in 1994 (after pledging that the scope of VAT would not be widened). He introduced a rate of 8% and intended to increase it to the full rate of 17.5% the following year but lost the vote in parliament. One of the first things Gordon Brown did was reduce the rate to 5%.

I believe once VAT is applied to a good or service, it can no longer be zero-rated and also that the minimum VAT rate allowed in the EU is 5%.

You really do need to brush up on your political history young Titan

Now?
We had a referendum about whether to remain in the EEC, under Harold Wilson (Labour) in 1975.

Borrowing and debt are up (hugely), long term unemployment is up, youth unemployment is up, wages and incomes of the bottom 95% have stagnated or depreciated against inflation, part-time working is up, zero-hours contracts are up, child poverty is up.
And growth was 0.7% last quarter, whoop-de-doo, take London out of the equation and large parts of the country are still in negative figures.
Yep, this country is a better place now, yes sirree.

Excellent post.

Don't forget welfare reform and more private sector jobs.

This is not a government achievement. Crime has been on a downward trajectory all across the developed world, It's ridiculous to give the government credit for this.


Net immigration is slightly down, but it's still 75% above the government's target, and last year it increased.


This is not a government achievement. The economy spends most of its time growing, that doesn't mean we should congratulate the government for this fact of life.
The important question is, are the government having a positive or negative impact on growth? To which the answer is: The government's measures are slowing economic growth because they are overseeing huge spending cuts, at a time when the country is in a liquidity trap and the fiscal multiplier is much larger than normal.


This is not a government achievement. Maybe if they weren't cutting taxes for the wealthiest individuals, and large corporations, they would have enough money to avoid some of the cuts to services and benefits that are devastating some of the country's poorest and most vulnerable people.


This is factually incorrect. I found it harder than I expected to find official figures to contradict this. However, [url=http://blogs.ft.com/martin-wolf-exchange/2013/05/23/austerity-in-the-eurozone-and-the-uk-kill-or-cure/?Martin Wolf says that the government has halved public investment[/url, and Nick Clegg earlier in the year [url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21190108apologised for the cuts in capital spending[/url admitting they had been a mistake, so I think it's pretty safe to say you've got this one wrong as well.


This is not a government achievement. If you don't want to be fined for speeding, don't speed.


This is not a government achievement. The government has spectacularly missed its own targets on this one. The deficit is higher than it was going to be under Labour plans which Osborne derided for not cutting the deficit fast enough.


This is not a government achievement - yes that is what tends to happen after a recession. It would probably be higher had the government not ruined economic growth with their self defeating austerity measures.


This is factually incorrect. Exactly what quantitative evidence have you seen which suggests this?
Do you genuinely think education standards didn't increase at all from 1970-2010? If so then you are a moron.


So the test of a good government isn't have they defended the weakest most vulnerable in society? Have they made the country fairer? Have they laid the foundations for a prosperous future for the country? Have they enhanced Britain's position on the global stage?

Instead it roughly translates as: if a government comes in power just after a global recession, then regardless of the government's policies the country will be in a better position when they leave, therefore they have been successful. Can you genuinely not see a problem with that?

Well you live and learn.

2 economically ignorant people in a mutual appreciation society, who would ever have thought it?


Oh and by the way.

[size=200WHICH ECONOMY?[/size

Another 'yah boo' post from behind the coat tails of another poster.

Not bothered to answer any of the questions yet, though.

It may be nothing, but can someone please explain to me why i keep seeing this ad at the bottom of my RLFans screen?



Surely not?

Would you bet against it?

Nice find – and retort.

This thought crossed my mind as well. If we all went solar and ground sourced heat pumps etc demand would drop so theoretically so should prices but I think that would only occur if there was over production and a surplus of supply. I can't ever see that being the case because as demand drops production of things like gas and oil is scaled back.

I see one MP was lamenting the fact there isn't true competition within the market such that when one energy provider ups prices they all do and not one of them holds fast and tries to attract more customers by undercutting the rest.

I am not sure if they could given they all price gas two years in advance and adopt hedging strategies to try and get a good deal for themselves. So they are all paying more or less the same price so unless any of them are particularly good or bad at hedging there won't be much variance.

So this is just another reason why it makes me think every way you look at trying to get to the capitalist nirvana of competition driving prices down it's never going to happen with gas production.

The only things you can do apart from nationalise it all again (which would get my vote) is ensure they aren't acting as cartels, aren't profiteering and also try and reform the entire wholesale market or maybe even nationalise that if you have natural gas resources yourself as a country. It seems bonkers to produce the stuff if you can, sell it onto a market then have energy companies buy it back.

Let's see what the Energy company bosses come up with when questioned in Westminster today.
I can't a cartel being provable as it's most likely not a classic cartel where they agree amongst themselves what price to rig at.
Rather it's that they are happy to copy each other and put prices up way more than cost rises.

What is the regulator doing about all this?
I agree with you, as the notion of genuine competition is demonstrably proven not to exist in this market, it's time to re-nationalise.

Well the CEO of OVO energy a small provider for the Bristol area says naff all.

One MP made the point I did above about if we all went renewable they would be stuffed as businesses.

Lots of stating the obvious from MP's. Lots of obvious replies from the energy companies.

I can see the only thing to come out of this will be the removal of the green levy which will give us £60 off our bills for a year before the next price increase wipes it out.

Still Cameron will have been able to say he delivered on a promise despite the fact removing the funding for the green levy would put a stop to the installation of free cavity wall insulation and boiler replacement programs etc for the least well off thus no longer reducing their bills long term.

On this morning's BBC there was a clip of one energy boss saying that if he couldn't charge a certain %age, he couldn't pay staff etc etc.
It sounded to me like a deliberate confusion of which variable costs were actually varying.

i.e. The retail energy companies' costs are not limited to the price of the raw material, they have to pay staff, the cost of delivery of the energy, billing, etc etc.
When the raw material price goes up by, say, 5%, and the rest of their costs remain pretty much static, that's only a higher cost for that element of the product, not a higher cost for all the other elements of the product ... and therefore doesn't mean the final selling price has to even go up by 5%, never mind 10%.

It is worse than that. These companies act as generators and suppliers (for electricity not gas) and their own figures say they make a profit on [igeneration[/i of between 17% and 23%.

However they don't consider the generation and retail side of their operations part of the same business so all the crying about not being able to pay staff is due to the fact they ignore how much money they make from generation.

They run them as separate businesses and so if the retail side can only buy electricity from the market at whatever is the going rate and that means to maintain profits they must charge what they do, they see that as simply the fact of the matter and nothing can be done about it.

This is what Milliband wants to change. Whenever his freeze on energy prices is mentioned in the press it is very rare you see mentioned the reason he wants a freeze is [uso he can reform the markets[/u.

The call from the energy companies for the Competition Commission to get involved is a smoke screen as that would not consider if the markets are working, just if within the markets [ias they are[/i whether there is competition and not price fixing or whatever.

Milliband's idea is not to have an inquiry for two years but to actually get on and change things. It makes DC's non-existent solution of removing the green levy look really pathetic but of course the press being mostly right wing as I said rarely mentions that the price freeze is there to allow the markets to be reformed.

This is the key point, the retail and wholesale operations are separate, so the retail operation must pay at the market rate regradless of who the wholesale supplier is. The profit margins of the retail operations are not particularly high, about 5%, less than what most people will pay on other retail services they consume.

So what to do about this? That's much harder.

Forcing them to operate as integrated units in itself doesn't help and it risks greater monopoly/oligopoly power for those who have both retail and wholesale operations. The energy market is basically an international market for commodities and the UK is not self-sufficient (maybe with fracking we could push that way) so the wholesale costs don't magically change by trying to force wholesale and retail together.

Having a state monopoly doesn't really help anything for the same reasons, it just doesn't address the wholesale cost as we have to buy it in, all you can do is try to cross subsidise through taxation, which economically just makes it a question of tax incidence (it doesn't fundamentally change anything but it might allow some people to dellude themselves into feeling better about it). Looking to bring substitute energy supplies on stream is only worthwile if they are actually going to cost less than buying from the existing market, so chucking money at renewables/coal/nuclear/fracking/other only makes sense if the fundamental unit costs are going to be lower or we're just back round to subsidies and tax incidence. And finally the deadweight costs of a state monopoly are not actually needed to operate subsidies (if they are actually allowed under EU law), so state monopolies don't really bring anything to the party beyond any incidental statist ambitions people are bringing along for the ride.

So I think we're down to what people really want, but cannot have, and that is for the wholesale market to cross subsidise the retail market by suppling to UK retail at below market prices. But that is cloud cuckoo land because if we don't want to pay the wholesale market price the suppliers will simply sell it to someone else.

That's the theory. The point is that it is not the reality. As pointed out in the recent [iWhich?[/i investigation.

If energy suppliers are failing to compete (as it appears generally) then they are operating in the same frame as would a monopoly and [uthey[/u are bringing nothing to the party ... so it might as well be state-run, if only to save the profits for the consumer.
Plus, as DaveO has pointed out, generators' and suppliers' (for electricity not gas) own figures say they make a profit on generation of between 17% and 23%.
So, for electricty at least, bills could be a whole heap cheaper.

Plus, as I mentioned before, a set 5% profit margin might look low but as the wholesale cost of energy rises, the retail price is rising by more.

If I buy socks at 50p and sell them for a pound and then, due a global sock shortage, the wholesale price goes up to 60p ... I only need to increase my selling price to £1.10 to make exactly the same profit. (The energy retailers are not doing this).
If I increased the selling price at the same percentage rate that my sock costs have risen by, I'd charge £1.20. (The energy retailers are telling us it's right to do this .... and then some more !).

What we really need to know is what % of the consumer bill equates to generation costs, then we'll know how much profit that really equates to. Some Ofgen figures on the BBC put overall wholesale costs as 46% of the consumer bill (dual fuel). So what we need to know is what % of the wholesale cost is generation, and then we can make some assumptions about how much the profit on generation equates to in consumer bill terms. So effectively it will be a % profit on a % generation cost of the 46% overall wholesale cost.

Also, on whether competition is working, another graph on the BBC suggests that our retail energy bills are amongst the lowest in Europe, second lowest in EU 15, which makes me think talk about competition not working in the UK is really a red herring. The problem is more fundamental and relates to global supply and demand of energy, and talk of nationalising or doing expensive competition investigations is simply about creating the illusion of activity without dealing with the really hard problems.

You have a point here, in that a massive part of the problem on fuel bills is that cost of living as a whole in the UK is so high – housing being a particular case, but not the only one. With wages having been driven down over the last 30 years, while the cost of living has risen hugely, the issue is not simply the cost of fuel bills, but the cost of living as a whole.

And when companies ratchet up their bills by vast, way-above-official-inflation amounts, people will see it and feel it particularly keenly.

So ultimately the points that need to be tackled are related to the rising cost of living and falling levels of income.

...of course in the days when power stations were coal fired and UK PLC owned all of the coal mines, and owned all of the rail network to transport the coal, and owned all of the power stations to generate the electricity, and owned all of the grid to distribute the electricity, and owned all of the gas fields or coal gas producers, and owned all of the network of gas distrubution...

...then any such costs were just overheads and profit was not a primary motivator in distributing energy.

It doesn't follow that the reason for this is competition in the UK. Other countries bills could be higher for any number of reasons.

However the important point is it does't matter if we do have some of the lowest energy bills. What does matter is if this competition we supposedly have has driven the costs down to the lowest they can be in absolute terms, not whether they are the lowest compared to others and this is obviously not the case.

After all that was the promise of privatisation.

Whatever competition there is [ihas[/i resulted in the problem El B mentioned, of price increases being passed on at the same % as the wholesale price increases thus inflating profit. The fact we may still have cheaper energy than others when the generators are making 17%-23% profit also means our retail cost is too high.



The problems of supply need to be dealt with but talk of nationalisation is certainly not giving an illusion to anything as it would theoretically reduce bills by a certain percentage permanently unlike removing the green levy which would have an effect for 12 months at most. Now that really is an illusion.