I Just Don't Have the Energy...Again

Hoping for the Government to do something about the price hikes in the cost of energy is like a man in jail hoping that those who banged him up will do something to get him out.

Bad as those hikes are, worse is yet to come...and is set to keep on coming for many years, as good old Britain borrows more billions to comply with the European Union's carbon capture directives.

Ed Miliband signed up to these in 2008 when, as Gordon Brown's Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, he put through Parliament the Climate Change Act. According to Christopher Booker and Richard North, who know their EU from their elbow, this piece of folly commits this country to forking out £18 billion a year for 37 years until 2050 on measures to reduce carbon emissions in the belief that this will prevent polar bears from wandering down the high street in Great Yarmouth.

Gentle skimmer, 37 times £18 billion comes to, er, £666 billion, a devilishly large number of billions for a country more than a trillion quid in debt.

Why hasn't David Cameron challenged the Labour leader to own up to his role in this nightmare in the House of Commons? For there is a direct correlation between the cost of climate change policies and the escalating costs of gas and electricity. The eight major energy suppliers are simply passing on their costs to the consumer to boost profitability.

More to the point, why hasn't any politician made this point? The reason isn't hard to fathom. All the major political parties signed up to the Climate Change Act. Until a few years ago they were vying with one another to be greener than green lest the righteous brothers and sisters of the eco movement, biting their nails over the future of the planet - Prince Charles famously declared humanity had but seven years to do it - won the support of voters.

Happily all that has gone grey about the gills in spite of the best endeavours of the Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change and its network of fervant believers in academia and the media. Climate change has been a fact of nature since the world began, millennia before the ancestors of Ed Miliband, David Cameron and Nick Clegg built bonfires to roast a leg of raptor for supper.

In happier times, before the Conservatives thought up the wheeze of flogging off public assets, you could bob along to a properly designated shop and pay your gas or electricity bill. More, you could talk to somebody face to face if you had a problem. Energy prices, like the rates, used to fluctuate. Not any more.

Until such time as Britain has the sense to begin divorce proceedings against the EU and find a way out of the sinking ship, the price of power is going to keep on rising annually. We are being covertly coerced into using less electricity by people whose index-linked incomes paid from the public purse mean they will never have to choose between heating and eating.

Meanwhile, forget about switching power suppliers, they're all part of a cabal playing follow-my-leader. Instead, think of ways of generating your own power. Nikola Tesla, the man who popularised Alternating Current against Edison's more expensive and limited Direct Current, maintained that electricity could be provided free of charge by tapping into the energy generated by nature. Evidently, his idea was not well received.

Hence that devilish sum of £666 billion.

A less charitable spark might conclude that the current media fright about the darkness that awaits when the power runs out is just another media scare - like salmonella, mad cow disease, manmade global warming. If it has an ulterior purpose can it be to make us pay the inflated price hikes coming with a feeling of almost gratitude for having power at all?

I wouldn't be surprised if we were being worked on in this way. It's like boxing: make your opponent worry about your jab, then hit him with an unxpected uppercut.

In the words of T S Eliot...

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters.
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury...

So begins East Coker (hah!), the third section of Eliot's Four Quartets. When I was a boy coke was something that only arty people snorted. For everybody else it was an alternative domestic fuel to coal. In those days you could be poor but warm in winter. Now you can be relatively well off and cold, as the statesmen and rulers, chairmen of many committees and distinguished civil servants, burn your money.