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Why is Newsnight succumbing to yet more populist drivel in talking about a windfall tax?

The Energy Minister made it perfectly plain (most recently when speaking on Rachel Burdon's programme on Radio Five a couple of nights ago) that raising taxes on energy companies would make the problem of high prices worse not better, because it would deter companies from investing in the UK North Sea......

....and he is quite right to say so - and indeed should be commended for not kow-towing to ignorant propositions like this one!

The Government already take 75% tax on North Sea production (according to the BG CEO) - isn't that already more than enough?

And if the proponents of a windfall tax are in anyway serious, why are they not taking into account that the recipient of by far the largest windfall from high oil prices in the UK is in fact the Government itself!

Its a shame that Kirsty's Scottish connections can't dig up much better stories on the topic of North Sea oil - if I wanted to be fed drivel I'd buy a red-top!

The government should make it compulsorily much easier to switch between the energy providers!

I can't believe the market is competitive if it takes me two months to switch providers and if I have to pay a fee to go to someone who can sell me electricity or gas more cheaply!

I'll be for a windfall tax on the gas companies when the government starts paying them back when the price goes down. This is business, not charity. The cost to explore and extract and to distribute energy is not nothing. It is extraordinarily costly up front investment and increasingly risky as reserves become more expensive and dangerous to access and distribute. This is lazy thinking by people who have had it good for too long, spent too much, not saved enough and now think others owe them a living. And no, I don't work for BG. I just support the idea of small government, leaving business to do what it is best at. Where we need to work harder is with the monopolies and mergers issues, so that we prevent oligarchic structures developing, not bolting on taxes because the government has already spent the kitting and more attempting to buy back political capital. What about the old idea of necessity breeding invention? If there is a gap in the market, then someone will work hard to fill that gap.

It's an interesting contrast to see the story about energy company profits and a windfall tax along with the studies on UK CO2 output actually rising (taking into account aviation, shipping, imported goods etc.). If the government had actually shown some leadership on what will eventually be permanent changes to the UK's lifestyle by 2050, there would have been money in the economy for greater energy diversification or for bicycle/public transport infrastructure. The third runway would also be off the agenda. Instead for many people, the rise in the price of oil and gas has been a shock. When I look around me in suburbia, many families have 3 large saloon cars parked on recently ripped out front gardens. They almost make a point of using a lot of energy to do small things (short journey to a supermarket for instance). Now the market is doing the work the government should have done over the last 10 years, but it is unlikely to make the changes consensual or long term. If those recent reports are correct, the UK will need to do more on climate change and the economy will need to function in order to finance necessary social and economic change. Energy companies are going to need their cash to scrap the oil infrastructure.

Interesting that the two people Newsnight digs up to discuss windfall taxation were:

1) Brian Wilson [con]; and 2) Jim McGovern MP for Dundee West [pro]. Wilson was one of the 3 Ministers who launched the New Deal in Dundee in January 1998 (with Gordon Brown and Donald Dewar). Ten years on some of the people in the Wellgate Job Centre that day are still waiting for the DWP to get back to them with any form of job search assistance after telling people that 'the Executive and Professional Job Vacancies register was privatised in 1984 and ceased to exist in 1989' - so please go away. New Deal was a con from beginning to end: a joyless benefit reduction scheme designed in London with armies of fat cat consultants getting rich on the backs of the poor- using windfall taxes!

New Deal was of course funded by Brown's windfall tax on recently privatised utilities -as a 'quid pro quo' for the abandonment of Clause Four Part Four of The Labour Party constitution and promises by Labour not to take these money-making monopolies back into poblic ownership. A complete sell-out -
which has now come back to haunt Labour as energy prices sky-rocket along with the profits made by these capitalist freeloaders.

Administration of New Deal in Scotland was then handed over to Brown and Wilson's
cronies in the private sector - the head of
Scottish Power chaired the committee up
here and was then succeeded by Labour
Party donors. The scheme failed on Day1
but the windfall tax revenue disappears!
Numpties with no experience of running
'employment premium' schemes - which had been pioneered in the 1980's by Scottish local authorities with some success - are
put in charge of spending these 'windfalls'
and ten years on the problems all remain.

Shame too that you didn't pin McGovern on the Tayside post office closures announced
yesterday either. He is the PPS to Pat McFadden (the Minister for Post Office closures) and he seems to be the only
Labour politician in Dundee who was
defending these closures yesterday
in his own constituency! Given that
Dundee's James Chalmers came up
with the idea of the adhesive postage stamp in 1834 and passed it on to the Parliament in London in 1839 - before the Penny Black is issued in 1840 and Rowland Hill grabs the credit - these Labour closures remain controversial in the City of Discovery.

McGovern defends post office closures in Dundee W

James Chalmers
inventor of the postage stamp in Dundee

windfall tax wasted on quangos doesn't help me with energy costs.

however a two way grid would.


.....


blowing the NN budget on nostalgic Arty clothes shops? Someone smoking something.

Great footage of the Barron's in the Beatles clip one for Google eh ?