Is capping domestic energy prices an equitable way to help the ‘just about managing’, or an electoral gimmick with a whiff of anti-free-market ideology? When it was Ed Miliband’s idea, it was certainly the latter. Now it’s likely to be included in Theresa May’s manifesto, offering a potential £100 saving for millions of homes on ‘standard variable tariffs’, it is defended by the ever-plausible Sir Michael Fallon as a matter of ‘intervening to make markets work better’. And that, after all, is what the Prime Minister said she would do, wherever necessary, in the interests of fairness.
In a regulated market, within which the consumer’s ability to choose the most favourable tariff or supplier is notoriously obscured by complex competing offers, an intervention to help inflation-hit householders is hardly a serious assault on capitalism, even if it hurts the shareholders and even dents the executive bonuses of suppliers such as Centrica and SSE.
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