Paul Goodman of Conservative Home commented on Tony Lodge’s lead Editor’s letter in The Telegraph on Thursday 21st February 2013.
To view the full article, please visit the Conservative Home website
“Tony Lodge of the Centre for Policy Studies had a letter in this morning’s Daily Telegraph about how to tackle “the looming energy crisis”. One can’t accuse Lodge, a regular contributor to this site, of shying away from the root of the problem, which in his view is the EU’s Large Combustion Plant Directive. He wrote:
David Cameron should now act in the national interest and deviate from the EU directive, instead keeping those coal and oil plants that are under sentence as an emergency energy reserve for the next five years, allowing them to be used when necessary to provide electricity.
Let’s leave aside the technical issues raised by Lodge’s proposal (the Government is already implementing the directive, so there would be compensation implications), not to mention the legal ones (which would doubtless help to swell the coffers of various HugeFee QCs), and imagine for a moment that the Prime Minister took his advice.
As Lodge himself points out, there would still be “an elephant in the room” – namely, the Carbon Price Floor, which in essence will see the companies concerned paying extra taxes to government…which, in turn, will mean consumers paying extra costs to companies in the form of higher bills as costs are passed on to them.
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I hope that we have followed in Lodge’s footsteps by not shying away from the root of the problem.”
To view the full article, please visit the Conservative Home website
Date Added: Monday 21st February 2011
