Households will pay a £170-a-year Net Zero levy on energy bills in the coming days, with Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt accused of “slyly” shifting costs back to consumers. The Telegraph has the story.
The Telegraph has learned that the two-year suspension of green levies announced last autumn is to end from the beginning of July, after just nine months.
The cost of the levies was shifted from consumer bills to be funded instead by the Government, following a year-long campaign by energy firms and MPs amid spiralling gas, electricity and food prices last year.
It will again be imposed on consumers, although there has been no formal announcement. Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, who was Business and Energy Secretary when the costs were taken away from consumers last year, said: “Green levies are part of the problem behind the U.K.’s particularly high electricity prices. They ought to be abolished but should fall on general taxation until that can happen. The ambition for Net Zero must not make us cold and poor. Any new or re-imposed charge ought to be announced to Parliament first and not slipped through slyly.”
The decision to fund the green levies via general taxation, as opposed to consumer bill payments, was announced by Kwasi Kwarteng, the then Chancellor, when he unveiled the energy bailout used by the Government to subsidise consumer bills since its creation in October.
At the time, the Government said: “Schemes previously funded by green levies will also continue to be funded by the Government during this two-year period to ensure the U.K.’s investment in home-grown, secure renewable technologies continues.”
But the Treasury will stop funding the cost – which has risen from £150 last year to £170 now – from July, meaning that it will be borne by consumers once again.
A Treasury source insisted that the move was “not an active decision of this administration”.
Due to the way the Energy Price Guarantee (EPG), the Government bailout, was designed, it covered the green levies on bills, the source said. From July, when EPG subsidies will end for most bill-payers, so will Treasury funding of the green levies.
The disclosure prompted astonishment among senior Tories – particularly after Grant Shapps, the Net Zero Secretary, told the Telegraph on Saturday: “We know we need to fund this transition, but we don’t want to do it through household levies… I don’t want to see people’s household bills unnecessarily bashed by this.”
Mr. Shapps said he wanted to scrap plans for a new £120-a-year levy to fund the hydrogen industry. However, days after his remarks, consumers will once again be saddled with the £170-a-year cost of levies that fund other ‘green’ schemes, ranging from the installation of home insulation, to historical contracts with wind farm developers.
Tory parliamentarians and Government figures consulted by the Telegraph said they had expected the charges to be borne by the Treasury for at least the two-year period announced in September. Critics of the levies had expected a public debate about whether the charges should then be reimposed on consumers, either in part or in full, or scrapped altogether.
Worth reading in full.
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Mask effects are:
1-You are advertising yourself as an idiot
2-You are admitting you are ugly
3-Both 1 and 2
You eat bacteria, co2, plastic carcinogens and reduce oxygen levels and they do nothing against a 0.03 sized nano sized particle I am not the science but I would classify that as unhealthy.
It’s staggering it has taken 3 years
An A level science class could design the experiment
‘….for years and years and years the Chief Medical Officers and their departments are supposed to have been preparing for the next pandemic, they even had some high-placed people doing that, importantly, and yet they had completely failed to invest in assessment and development of physical interventions, new physical interventions, and even new materials and new technologies. They have completely failed to do that…’
That kind of comment could no doubt read across to most sectors of government in this country, all the while intervening with regulations to make life more difficult, expensive for private citizens, the private sector, ‘net zero’ being the most remarkably stupid example ‘de nos jours’
I looked up the C.V. of a particular MP this morning: ‘After her graduation (University of Sussex)…. became a policy adviser to her father, in his role as a MEP. Prior to her election she was chief executive of the National Pony Society, an animal welfare charity…..and then a local borough councillor…..’
Belgium showed us the way:
‘….the longest period in which a country has been without an elected government, at 589 days’
Sort of related, but were people aware of this? Football regulator: New white paper delayed until later this month – BBC Sport
The publication of the UK government’s long-awaited white paper proposing reforms to shake up football has been delayed to later this month.
So we’re in a perma-crisis but the government has time to poke its nose into FOOTBALL – a sport that appears to be thriving at every level – popular, not short of money. If there was ever a non-problem, football in the UK is it (and even if it were a problem, WTAF does it have to do with HMG?). The “Culture secretary” is involved. Why do we need a “Culture secretary”, or can we afford one when the government can’t even catch criminals or ensure the conditions are optimised for us to have cheap energy with no political strings, protect our borders.
FOOTBALL – a sport that appears to be thriving at every level
That’s the problem tof – thriving. We can’t be having thriving in the UK. Only one solution, government involvement. Where there isn’t a problem introduce government and there soon will be. And what do problems require?
Solutions. Nice and tidy.
Bang on the money!
Yet more evidence that this is a ‘democratic’ socialist fascist government.
‘Italy was the first state, together with the Soviet Union, to organize [an explicit] policy that would lead the country to become a sports nation.’ In this regard, Mussolini’s plan began with the promotion of new soccer clubs and huge stadiums across Italy.’
‘When Giorgio Vaccaro, the FIGC president, met with Mussolini to officially inform him that Italy would host the second World Cup, the following dialogue reportedly occurred:
The Duce sounds exactly like Hancock……
Thanks to Dr Tom Jefferson and the other authors for doing this very important Cochrane review
A statement like there doesn’t appear to be any convincing evidence that masks make any difference to transmission. They may do, but the evidence is not present from trials at present is all the mask-pushers need: Masks may work! The precautionary principle dictates that they must be worn! In fact, even Chris Whitty, UK mask-pusher in chief of not that long ago, never claimed anything else. He always just said that masks may reduce transmission by …%.
Considering this, Dr Jefferson, no thanks for this interview. A more honest summary would be We don’t now what – if any – effect masks have on transmission. They might prevent it. Or enhance it. Or – depending on the situation – might both prevent it in some cases and enhance in some other cases. Or they might have no effect on it at all. And because we don’t know this, no rational argument for wearing or even mandating them can be made.
From the authors’ conclusions on page 3 of the full report
Harms associated with physical interventions were under-investigated
And the confidence intervals of masks effectiveness includes negative and positive efficacy as indicated in the transcript above.
An acknowledgement of uncertainty is all that the authors are doing and that acknowledgement strengthens the case against masks in my view, when compared with the un-evidenced assertions that masks work.
I’m specifically referring to the sentence from the interview I quoted. That’s exactly the completely official argument in support of masks: They may prevent transmissions. True believers are convinced they do. So-called scientists mandated them based on an appeal for ignorance which is a logical fallacy.
And my point is that it’s almost impossible to conduct an interview like this and not say something that could be taken out of context or twisted in some way. The confidence interval itself is mentioned in this interview albeit by Carl Heneghan
And that the review itself is the evaluation of the evidence and not a line from an interview about it.
Given the amazing job Tom Jefferson has done in destroying the case for masks, to say ‘no thanks for the interview’ is somewhat mean spirited in my view.
I’ve neither taken this out of context nor twisted it anyhow. In the answer to the third question, it’s stated that
The result means that regardless of what pathogen or what presenting symptom there is no evidence from high quality studies that either medical or surgical masks make any difference to transmission,
This reappears in the answer to the fourth question in weaker form as
there doesn’t appear to be any convincing evidence that masks make any difference to transmission. They may do, but the evidence is not present from trials at present.
And that’s, for all practical purposes, just Chris Witty’s Masks may reduce transmission. Plus a hint that future trials may well additionally prove that they do. That’s not helpful unless the agenda is mask marketing or even mask mandate marketing and a simple admission of ignorance (like the example I gave) had served the case against masks, if that’s supposed to be a case against masks, much better.
Don’t get me wrong, I am glad people are gathering scientific evidence to demonstrate the futility of masks.
However, it’s a terrible indictment of our society that scientific evidence is required in the first place to demonstrate something so spectacularly obvious.
If there was an advantage to covering our mouths in some way, I am quite certain that we would have evolved in that way, much like our eyes have a cover. Or our ears. But I’m pretty sure our mouths and noses are open for a very good reason.
But such are things now that if the government mandated that everyone had to block our anal passage with a cork while out and about, we’d be compelled to conduct a range of scientific studies to demonstrate that it was probably a really bad idea.
How many decades has the medical profession being using masks and only now they discover this.