Ed Militard - Time To Change The Narrative

There's no doubting the fact that the announced energy price rise from SSE, and soon to be followed by other providers, is a gift to Ed Militard and the Laborious Party. It means that he can get all worked up about unscruplulous capitalists exploiting the poor consumer and therefore pose as our friend and saviour. It conveniently ignores the part he played in bringing the high costs of energy through (hidden) green taxation - and the fact that he continues to support the same policies as part of a 'fight against climate change'. And lest we be accused of being one-sided here, Militard is doing no different to what that lying piece of shit Chris Huhne did. And brain-dead Ed Davey does the same thing - they all bleat about energy poverty but ignore the part they play in making this happen.

This is nothing new. We saw the same thing with the banking crisis. The popular narrative soon became that it was all the fault of the nasty bankers, conveniently ignoring the part that the politicians played. It meant that Gordon Brown and Barack Obama could both attempt to grab the moral high-ground and yet ignore the part that they had directly played in the fomenting the crisis. How many people really know that Obama pushed hard for policies for 'affordable housing' that ended up giving us the sub-prime crisis?

This isn't to say that the greedy energy companies meme is all wrong - but the problem is way more complex than pinning the blame on greedy executives and their shareholders. The fact is that governments have been dicking with the energy industry in all kinds of ways - green taxes, subsidies in 'renewables', changing the energy supply mix, closing down cheap coal-powered stations, dragging their feet on shale and much more.

So, it's important then that at every conceivable opportunity we remind people of the part that Militard, Davey and the rest have played  - continue to play - in creating the precarious energy supply situation and the high costs that we have to pay. We must not let the politicians do what they do best - create or exacerbate a problem, pin the blame elsewhere and then pose as our saviours.

Quotes like these, from Ed Militard, should be repeated again and again until the message gets through:

November 2009:  It needs a willingness to take the argument to people about the tough choices involved in tackling climate change. This is the starting point: a willingness to engage with people on, for example, the fact that to deal with the problem of climate change, energy bills are likely to rise.

January 2010: Yes, there are upward pressures on energy bills, and that makes life difficult for people, including those in fuel poverty, but it is right that we go down the low-carbon energy route.