The Financial Times reports:
British consumers are anxious about energy prices, and with good reason. The cost of gas is up 41 per cent in real terms since 2007 and electricity has risen 20 per cent. The basic necessities of staying warm and lit absorb ever more of stagnating household incomes.
Rising global wholesale fuel costs may be unavoidable. But there is a suspicion that this is not the whole story. The structure of Britain’s energy supply industry – dominated by six vertically integrated giants – starves the sector of competition. It is hard to see how fat these companies’ margins are. The cynical public perception is that this opacity explains why prices shoot up with fuel costs but are sticky on the downside
Policy choices add to the burden. The government has loaded obligations on to energy companies (for which read consumers) to fund climate-change policies. Some 9 per cent of the average bill goes to pay for such initiatives.
And the not yet elderly have their future pension funds sunk into the same scam.
Of course it’s much worse than just the home energy costs, which are bad enough.
Raising the cost of energy raises the cost of nearly all other products and services. This curtails buying power and usually leads to lower production and employment than would be the case if the economy operated more freely.
This is also a leading cause of energy poverty which condemns millions of elderly Britons to a life of chilly rooms, limited mobility and reduced food choices.
And the elderly Britons voted for this all their lives, many of them.