They won't change anything.

It wasn't a fudge. Didn't Gordy offer the same to try & get the Lib Dems to go into coalition?

It was rejected because everyone watched the Auf Wiedersehen Pet clip.

So you've not seen any news for the last few days them?



If course it was a fudge, it was a halfway house to full PR with all the bad bits and very few of the advantages, it was put together by a mainly Tory government and was designed to keep LD activists quiet and not get the electorate interested at all.

Same, Davey boy could do with a bit of PR at the moment with those electoral boundary knocked back.

Care to show me the evidence of this absence?

He has a policy to get the energy companies to increase their prices before the next election, and then reduce investment in infrastructure after the election.

(although that lightbulb might not be much use in 2016 when the power goes off).

he can also pretty much guarantee that the pre-election Tory party coffers are swelled by donations from the energy market now.

I'm guessing that's your prediction of the result arising from his plan to freeze prices after the election?
i.e. That the energy companies will get their increases in early?

Whoops, wrong again.

Yes. There will be the inevitable increases before then anyway, but they will have to get the prices to 2017 levels in 2015, so they will just get there quicker and stay there for a couple of years. Not sure that the policy would even be legally enforceable.

Whilst it will hit the Big 6, they are most able to soak up any financial hardship for a couple of years; but many of the smaller players in the market will not be able to - so there will probably be another round of mergers and takeovers of the smaller companies, reducing competition and strengthening the oligopoly of the Big 6.

Has he thought about the staff in energy companies who can now expect not to get a pay rise for 20 months?

Having said that, Cameron's Energy Policy is not much better or well thought through.

not forgetting the inevitable big rise in 2017 when the price controls end.

As opposed to the demonised public service workers and the low paid (the two are one and the same on occasion) who haven't had a rise in years anyway?

The rising cost of utility bills is one reason why the cost of living has risen so much – to fund private profits.

We need to stop one group of workers saying that nothing can be done because of their wages when that affects another group of workers.

The real question should be why any worker should have seen their pay decrease over the last few years in relation to the cost of living, and what a government should do about that.

According to the ONS in November 2012, rises in the cost of living have outstripped wage rises for 12 straight years. Utility bills are a huge part of that problem.

In the last year or so, even posters on the [iTelegraph[/i forums have been noting that utility privatisation has damaged the domestic customer and not provided a great result. [iTelegraph[/i readers are muttering about renationalisation. That should tell people an awful lot.

I don't know if it was just Miliband's summary you listened to but Caroline Flint went into a bit more detail. The energy companies are positioning themselves in a similar way to the banks - too big to fail. There is a complete lack of transparency in the market, especially among those who are involved in production and distribution. The opportunity for fixing transfer pricing is undeniable and cannot be allowed to continue.

Rather than spelling out a firm policy, I think this more of a shot across the bows. The energy companies have been given plenty of opportunities to prove the market really is competitive and have failed miserably. I would't rule out windfall taxes or a forensic audit of the big players. And as far as the "what about a wagw freeze" argument, you'll get next to fookall sympathy from the vast majority of the population

Energy companies and their regulation are a joke. We had a gas bill today of c. £80 today of which just £18 was gas. The standing charge was £60!