Energy

The Prime Minister and the Energy Minister, Ed Davey, were unanimous in their response to the British Gas price hike this week by 10 per cent, about four times the rate of inflation – described judiciously by the PM as ‘disappointing’. Shop around! they said. ‘We need more competition!’ cried Mr Davey. They haven’t yet recorded their opinion of today’s price increase from little Co-op, another energy provider, at about twice the rate of inflation, but I expect it will be much the same. Funnily enough, even before the decision by another of the utilities companies, SSE, to increase their duel fuel bills by just under the British gas rate

At PMQs yesterday David Cameron said Ed Miliband was suffering ‘complete amnesia’ over his time as energy secretary. Ed might have forgotten some of his climate change policies that put money on your energy bills – but it doesn’t matter – they might not be around for long. As James Forsyth said at the weekend, George Osborne wants to get rid of some of them in his autumn statement. The Department of Energy and Climate Change says there are seven green taxes that put £112 on the average energy bill in 2013, making up just under a tenth of the total. What are they, and which of them is cost-of-living warrior Ed Miliband responsible

If this conference season is remembered for anything, it will be for Ed Miliband’s pledge to freeze energy prices. This pledge might be economically flawed but it has given the Labour leader a retail offer to voters and rebutted the charge that he doesn’t have any policies. Initially, the Tories were uncertain of how to respond. But, as I write in the Mail on Sunday, the Tory leadership has now decided what it wants to do. In George Osborne’s autumn statement, they want to remove some of the seven green taxes and levies that are driving up energy bills. Not only would this reduce the salience of Miliband’s pledge but

The Labour party held a briefing this morning for party campaigners on how they can follow up Ed’s speech on the doorstep. Activists had arrived at conference hoping for a simple message that they can sell to a voter in a dressing gown with their arms crossed and a sceptical expression on their face, and now they’ve got one: frozen energy bills. They were told that campaigning on energy bills wasn’t just something they can use on the doorstep this weekend, but a major digital and ground war campaign that is going to go on for months. The idea is to demand that David Cameron freeze bills now, using petitions.

Ronald Reagan once quipped that  “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” As was so often the case the Great Communicator was only half-joking. He knew government had important jobs to do, jobs only government could do. What was needed was a rebalancing. Government had become too invasive. It needed pruning. (Never mind that not much pruning took place; the rhetoric and the positioning was what mattered.) I didn’t watch Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour party conference this afternoon but no-one, I think, would say he possesses a Reaganesque delivery. But he was in Brighton to tell

A few months after the last election, Oliver Letwin warned Cabinet colleagues that a chunk of Britain’s income would be gone for good after the economic crisis. Letwin, who has always been the Cameron project’s in-house intellectual, told them that some of the complex high finance in which Britain had specialised was never coming back. We would have to develop a new form of economic activity to make up for the loss. The good news is that this new form is looming into view. Fracking the Bowland Shale alone will, on a relatively cautious estimate, produce the equivalent of 90 years of North Sea gas production. We will have to

‘We are going to see how thick their rectory walls are, whether they like the flaring at the end of the drive!’ Said Michael Fallon in jest at the expense of supporters of fracking in the Home Counties. As it happens, our very own Charles Moore lives in a rectory in East Sussex. He wrote this in the Spectator a few weeks back: ‘Another great advance for the environment is shale gas, though for some reason Greens do not see it that way. It will make us — and has already made America — far less dependent on high carbon-emitting sources of energy. It is lucky for those trying to extract