This is not a government achievement. Crime has been on a downward trajectory all across the developed world, It's ridiculous to give the government credit for this.


Net immigration is slightly down, but it's still 75% above the government's target, and last year it increased.


This is not a government achievement. The economy spends most of its time growing, that doesn't mean we should congratulate the government for this fact of life.
The important question is, are the government having a positive or negative impact on growth? To which the answer is
This is not a government achievement. Maybe if they weren't cutting taxes for the wealthiest individuals, and large corporations, they would have enough money to avoid some of the cuts to services and benefits that are devastating some of the country's poorest and most vulnerable people.


This is factually incorrect. I found it harder than I expected to find official figures to contradict this. However, rlMartin Wolf says that the government has halved public investmentrl, and Nick Clegg earlier in the year rlapologised for the cuts in capital spendingrl admitting they had been a mistake, so I think it's pretty safe to say you've got this one wrong as well.


This is not a government achievement. If you don't want to be fined for speeding, don't speed.


This is not a government achievement. The government has spectacularly missed its own targets on this one. The deficit is higher than it was going to be under Labour plans which Osborne derided for not cutting the deficit fast enough.


This is not a government achievement - yes that is what tends to happen after a recession. It would probably be higher had the government not ruined economic growth with their self defeating austerity measures.


This is factually incorrect. Exactly what quantitative evidence have you seen which suggests this?
Do you genuinely think education standards didn't increase at all from 1970-2010? If so then you are a moron.


So the test of a good government isn't have they defended the weakest most vulnerable in society? Have they made the country fairer? Have they laid the foundations for a prosperous future for the country? Have they enhanced Britain's position on the global stage?

Instead it roughly translates as: if a government comes in power just after a global recession, then regardless of the government's policies the country will be in a better position when they leave, therefore they have been successful. Can you genuinely not see a problem with that?

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 thisPrices have been rising at around 9% almost annually for several years, adding £300 to the average bill in this parliament. Over the same time, multibillion-pound profits made by the utility companies have soared by more 70%.[/irl

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.