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.

So you link to The Telegraph article, which shows again that the average Net Margin per customer is ~£50 as some kind of evidence that everyone's being ripped off on bills of over £1,000 per year on average? Even if it were wiped out entirely, it wouldn't make much difference to the size of the average bill. This idea that profit is somehow to blame for everything is rubbish.

A far bigger impact would be had by cutting direct and indirect taxes for example. I also have no problem with cutting executive pay enormously to help out.

Meanwhile, wholesale costs are almost as high as they've ever been - and when they were previously close to today's levels, energy companies were losing money. Hence the regulators have had to allow tariffs to rise.

codead - fossil fuels are of course the storage mechanism for energy. Energy companies (I'm including oil, gas and electricity companies) convert this stored energy into either a medium which customers can use themselves (i.e. gas and petrol), or directly into electricity.

Of course converting it uses some of the energy itself, but I suspect most people wouldn't be able to find oil and refine it for themselves, or run a power station, so that conversion is necessary unless you want to go back to the stone age.

In the end its us - individuals and industrial customers - that USE energy. If you want to change that usage by pushing people away from fossil fuels, then you MUST accept that the cost will fall on end-users. That is the WHOLE point of green costs - to make end users change behaviour.

Sadly far too many people live in a make-believe world where green costs can be charged to big bad industry, and somehow not impact the cost of living.

Talk of miniscule profit margins being made from companies who appear to be generating the very fuels that they then sell onto us end users is one thing, but the bit that I struggle to comprehend is how my energy supplier, Co-operative Energy, with its 142,000 customers can compete on price with the likes of EON and NPower, giving gross energy sales of £74.8 million and increasing their total trading profits by 16% last year.

In any other line of business you'd expect the manufacturer to hold the whip hand on pricing, a manufacturer who sells their product on an open trade market and also retails the same product to a huge domestic market should be able to completely control that market and yet they tell us that they make a miniscule profit margin from each of us consumers and sometimes a loss.

Something doesn't quite add up somewhere.

So [iWhich?[/i was wrong, was it?

The problem is no-one can find out how much profit the energy companies are actually making. They have several different companies and it's difficult to find out the true profit, the Commons Select Committee hearing found this problem too and I believe one of the smaller Energy company bosses said was the case

What bit of bills up 10% but Wholesale costs up a mere 1.7% don't you understand?

And this:

[url=http://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/sep/24/labour-energy-price-freeze-heat-david-cameron[iPrices have been rising at around 9% almost annually for several years, adding £300 to the average bill in this parliament. Over the same time, [umultibillion-pound profits made by the utility companies have soared by more 70%[/u.[/i[/url

suggests your original stance that "Privatisation, bonuses, profits, dividends etc are absolutely nothing to do with the reality of what's driving prices upwards."

is totally ridiculous.



It is not a punitive measure at all which is how you make it sound. It's a levy with the aim of reducing energy consumption by providing for improved insulation.