Low figures for both. "Apply to join" is tied with "Don't know".
I wouldn't know which to pluck for as both are misleading to my view which is stay out but importantly have closer and more productive ties than current policy. Technically that would make me stay out, but it would be misinterpreted.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
I think that Bulb has £1.7m customers, so that is about £1k per customer.
£1.7bn is the max cash requirement. The cost to the taxpayer will be far less.
Cost at the moment is expected to be 40% of that (I posted the figure yesterday) - so it's currently £700m.
And remember that the existing companies are having to sub that £400 from their reserves so don't expect prices to fall at any point in the next few years (there is a lot of debt to be made up).
Even that £400 both does depend on how winter plays out and how the market changes - you best bet long term is to get as energy efficient as possible.
Sorry to have missed your post yesterday. Where does the 40% figure come from?
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Yes the genuine refugees do that. That's kind of the point.
It would be interesting, though difficult, to see an unbiased analysis of why a minority do press on to the UK. For the benefits? Hardly - benefits are much more generous elsewhere. Because they speak some English and reckon they've got a better chance here? Possibly, but pay a fortune and risk death for that? Because they know others here and feel that would make life better?
The implication that taking risks to get here suggests they aren't genuine is a non-sequitur. Yes, step 1 is to get out of a hell-hole, and arrive in, say, Greece. But if you don't speak Greek or know any Greeks, and you do speak English and know someone in London, then step 2 may be to try to get here. That doesn't invalidate step 1.
There is a big undocumented economy in the UK compared to most European countries.
There are a lot of things that the government in this country just don't seem to be bothered about. This is one of them.
So the French know Global Britain’s black economy is what pulls the migrates across the world into inflatable boats, the migrants know it, the only people being hoodwinked here are UK electorate thinking their government has a tough policy?
So what 'pulls the migrates across the world' to a much greater degree to Germany and France? Why should France who takes 3 times the amount of migrants/refugees/asylum seekers that the UK does feel extra touchy feely about the island mentality of the UK electorate?
Language. The *perception* that the UK labour market is much less regulated - you can get a job and work your way up....
Sorry, perhaps I expressed my badly. On the numbers these people are drawn to a much greater degree to Germany and France than to the UK. The pervasive belief that everyone wants to come to the UK despite the numbers is just weird.
People who are in France seem to think that taking a RIB across the Channel is a good idea. This strongly suggests that they see the UK as much better than staying in France.
Getting to Germany from France would be fairly trivial by comparison.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The kremlinology is fascinating but really the problem is Boris, just as under Theresa May, getting rid of Nick and Fiona did not noticeably improve matters. Conservative MPs know this but it is safer to blame courtiers than the king.
Because Boris has no identifiable political credo, it is hard to forecast what policies he will favour. Because Boris is weak on detail, he is liable to change his mind once policy implications are made clear.
Take the Paterson affair, which the FT cites, and we have a decision (on what seemed like a clever wheeze to get Boris off the hook) made by an Old Etonian cabal, with a u-turn once Boris was rumbled. The fact (if it is a fact) there are different groups inside Number 10 is irrelevant if they are barely involved.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
On the news just now they announced that a 5th person has been arrested in France Re the boat people who died.
How is it that the French authorities can within 24 hours arrest 5 people, they must have enough evidence of their involvement, and not use that intelligence they must have had to arrest them before on people trafficking offences?
It’s another key question I have is why does there not seem to be a big enough intelligence effort to infiltrate the gangs or process to stop these gangs in the same way they target drugs gangs?
Because the French very much want them to leave.
Do you think the UK government would be popping a bollock to stop them crossing to France if the situation were reversed?
Dura Ace, you have such a unique writing style, have you ever thought about writing your auto biography?
Interestingly, I was approached by a publisher of military bios after one of my Sea Harrier talks to see if I would be interested. After some talks about talks I was not interested because they insisted on no obscenity, no highly graphic recounting of what were possibly war crimes, no explicit accounts of what sailors actually do on runs ashore and they hated my proposed title - "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" (Neutral Milk Hotel reference).
Self-publishing is the way forwards! You've got a loyal following on here to get the first sales/pay for the inevitable law suit.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
Because the customers still need to be provided with and pay for their Gas and Electric usage and no-one else is in a position to either do so and accept the risk of doing so.
This is the direct consequence of a cap being set below market rates
Could we build a consulate in Calais, and make it clear that you might be accepted if you go through there, but you definitely won't be if you cross ?
I don't see why something like this isn't being done. It must have occurred to the government, so what would be the obstacle?
With refugees I think there's a big problem in that the more you accept the more will come. They should be encouraged to stay at home and fix the mess they've made in their own countries. (Slightly tongue in cheek obviously but not completely)
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
I think that Bulb has £1.7m customers, so that is about £1k per customer.
£1.7bn is the max cash requirement. The cost to the taxpayer will be far less.
Cost at the moment is expected to be 40% of that (I posted the figure yesterday) - so it's currently £700m.
And remember that the existing companies are having to sub that £400 from their reserves so don't expect prices to fall at any point in the next few years (there is a lot of debt to be made up).
Even that £400 both does depend on how winter plays out and how the market changes - you best bet long term is to get as energy efficient as possible.
Sorry to have missed your post yesterday. Where does the 40% figure come from?
The £400 average per house figure comes from conversations at 2 different energy firms - as the figures matched, it's probably a good estimate (and it's for now through to April).
The key point of my system is they're being taken from British soil to British soil. We'd have to pay the French a fortune to buy the land from them but hey ho.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
It has gone bust, but with too many liabilities for any other business to take it on without a huge loss, and if they shut it down now, consumers will get shafted. So the government has to take the hit.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The idiotic energy price cap.
The cap is largely irrelevant. Think Northern Rock. The problem is buying short and selling long. When the short-term price peaks, Bulb (or NR) is stuffed. And as with Northern Rock, the political cost of letting consumers take the hit is too great.
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The idiotic energy price cap.
The cap is largely irrelevant. Think Northern Rock. The problem is buying short and selling long. When the short-term price peaks, Bulb (or NR) is stuffed. And as with Northern Rock, the political cost of letting consumers take the hit is too great.
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
The cap certainly isn't irrelevant, if there was no cap the customers could be moved to the rest of the big 6 on a SVT which would allow them to run at a normal profit.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
Because the customers still need to be provided with and pay for their Gas and Electric usage and no-one else is in a position to either do so and accept the risk of doing so.
This is the direct consequence of a cap being set below market rates
Sounds fucked. I presume it can and will happen again with other utterly pointless husks of companies.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The idiotic energy price cap.
The cap is largely irrelevant. Think Northern Rock. The problem is buying short and selling long. When the short-term price peaks, Bulb (or NR) is stuffed. And as with Northern Rock, the political cost of letting consumers take the hit is too great.
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
The cap certainly isn't irrelevant, if there was no cap the customers could be moved to the rest of the big 6 on a SVT which would allow them to run at a normal profit.
I don't know if it's true, but someone on here said all of Bulb's customers are on variable tariffs. So they wouldn't be going bust.
Mr. JohnL, this 'PB Tory' repeatedly condemned the stupid price cap when first proposed by Miliband and when enacted (was it by May?). It's a dumb policy.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The idiotic energy price cap.
The cap is largely irrelevant. Think Northern Rock. The problem is buying short and selling long. When the short-term price peaks, Bulb (or NR) is stuffed. And as with Northern Rock, the political cost of letting consumers take the hit is too great.
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
The cap isn't irrelevant. Suppose you are supplying 1m homes and you are told to supply another 200,000? How do you do that except by buying at the current variable market rate.
Now Bulb may have had a strange (to you) business model of dynamic price changes to reflect the current market price but 1.7million customers liked that business model, it wasn't illegal and it made sense to people who I suspect were market savvy.
The issue really is a very simple one, the cap needs to reflect current market prices and it very clearly doesn't - and equally those people who are happy to be on a dynamic pricing model should have been left on it sans cap.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The idiotic energy price cap.
The cap is largely irrelevant. Think Northern Rock. The problem is buying short and selling long. When the short-term price peaks, Bulb (or NR) is stuffed. And as with Northern Rock, the political cost of letting consumers take the hit is too great.
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
The cap certainly isn't irrelevant, if there was no cap the customers could be moved to the rest of the big 6 on a SVT which would allow them to run at a normal profit.
If the cap were the cause, all the suppliers would have gone bust. The problem is that, as with Northern Rock, the failed companies were buying in the short-term markets but selling to consumers at prices fixed over the long term.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
It has gone bust, but with too many liabilities for any other business to take it on without a huge loss, and if they shut it down now, consumers will get shafted. So the government has to take the hit.
It's not really 'the government' taking the hit though, is it? Surely it's either energy bill payers, taxpayers, or both?
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
Because the other companies would not want to take on the customers at a loss (due to the price cap). The cap is the issue.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
Because the customers still need to be provided with and pay for their Gas and Electric usage and no-one else is in a position to either do so and accept the risk of doing so.
This is the direct consequence of a cap being set below market rates
No, it's a direct consequence of a bunch of chancers exploiting a deregulated market and failing to hedge their costs when their revenues were capped.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The idiotic energy price cap.
The cap is largely irrelevant. Think Northern Rock. The problem is buying short and selling long. When the short-term price peaks, Bulb (or NR) is stuffed. And as with Northern Rock, the political cost of letting consumers take the hit is too great.
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
The cap certainly isn't irrelevant, if there was no cap the customers could be moved to the rest of the big 6 on a SVT which would allow them to run at a normal profit.
If the cap were the cause, all the suppliers would have gone bust. The problem is that, as with Northern Rock, the failed companies were buying in the short-term markets but selling to consumers at prices fixed over the long term.
They are going bust, the only ones not at risk are the international big 6 that have more reserves than the rest. I imagine the big 6 are putting the Gov't under intense pressure behind the scenes to raise the cap over the next few years or they'll all simply walk out of the UK domestic market. The Gov't either needs to nationalise, raise the cap or big loans. We've seen the start of the big loans route..
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The idiotic energy price cap.
The cap is largely irrelevant. Think Northern Rock. The problem is buying short and selling long. When the short-term price peaks, Bulb (or NR) is stuffed. And as with Northern Rock, the political cost of letting consumers take the hit is too great.
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
The cap certainly isn't irrelevant, if there was no cap the customers could be moved to the rest of the big 6 on a SVT which would allow them to run at a normal profit.
If the cap were the cause, all the suppliers would have gone bust. The problem is that, as with Northern Rock, the failed companies were buying in the short-term markets but selling to consumers at prices fixed over the long term.
That's the reason for Bulb going bust yes, and its their failed business.
Its not the reason why the Big 6 won't take on Bulb's customers on a SVT though.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
It has gone bust, but with too many liabilities for any other business to take it on without a huge loss, and if they shut it down now, consumers will get shafted. So the government has to take the hit.
It's not really 'the government' taking the hit though, is it? Surely it's either energy bill payers, taxpayers, or both?
Well energy bill payers and taxpayer tend to be the same people..
People who are in France seem to think that taking a RIB across the Channel is a good idea. This strongly suggests that they see the UK as much better than staying in France.
Getting to Germany from France would be fairly trivial by comparison.
Most refugees in France don't try to come to Britain. Obviously some do and take huge risks to do it, but the balance is around 4:1 preferring France or feeling that their chances are better there.
Those are two facts that are not really in dispute. Perhaps if it was less dangerous it would be more even, though?
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
I think that Bulb has £1.7m customers, so that is about £1k per customer.
£1.7bn is the max cash requirement. The cost to the taxpayer will be far less.
Cost at the moment is expected to be 40% of that (I posted the figure yesterday) - so it's currently £700m.
And remember that the existing companies are having to sub that £400 from their reserves so don't expect prices to fall at any point in the next few years (there is a lot of debt to be made up).
Even that £400 both does depend on how winter plays out and how the market changes - you best bet long term is to get as energy efficient as possible.
In future the regulator needs to ensure energy firms have sufficient capital to match their number of customers and hedging risks. It is crazy to allow limited companies a hugely leveraged free bet on energy prices subsidised by taxpayer (and industry competitor) implicit backstop guarantees.
There's effectively no limit to the capital that might be required to cover unhedged commitments to supply energy at a fixed rate. How many people would have thought that the astronomical increases in wholesale prices this winter were ever possible?
So you'd have to ban selling fixed price deals without hedging.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The idiotic energy price cap.
The cap is largely irrelevant. Think Northern Rock. The problem is buying short and selling long. When the short-term price peaks, Bulb (or NR) is stuffed. And as with Northern Rock, the political cost of letting consumers take the hit is too great.
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
The cap isn't irrelevant. Suppose you are supplying 1m homes and you are told to supply another 200,000? How do you do that except by buying at the current variable market rate.
Now Bulb may have had a strange (to you) business model of dynamic price changes to reflect the current market price but 1.7million customers liked that business model, it wasn't illegal and it made sense to people who I suspect were market savvy.
The issue really is a very simple one, the cap needs to reflect current market prices and it very clearly doesn't.
Don't fall for Tory spinners moving the goal posts. The cap is not why Bulb and the other two dozen chancers went bust. That is as I have explained. CCHQ wishes to ignore the 22 failures and explain instead why the sensible suppliers do not want to take over Bulb's contracts. And that is so they can blame Ed Miliband for what was actually Conservative legislation and regulation.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
Because the customers still need to be provided with and pay for their Gas and Electric usage and no-one else is in a position to either do so and accept the risk of doing so.
This is the direct consequence of a cap being set below market rates
No, it's a direct consequence of a bunch of chancers exploiting a deregulated market and failing to hedge their costs when their revenues were capped.
The proper suppliers have played a smarter game.
But the cap makes it impossible for the 'proper suppliers' to take on the customers of your bunch of chancers.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
After being roughly range bound between 25-75 pence / therm for more than a decade, natural gas spot prices went through the roof this Autumn (for a variety of reasons) and are now trading at something like 4-5x the long term average. Current prices are about 225p / therm: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/uk-natural-gas
In 2019 (IIRC) the UK government had put in place a price cap on the price / therm gas companies could charge (mostly to prevent outrageous money grubbing by companies looking to exploit clients who’s only option was to be on pre-payment meters I think). As a result, any gas supply company who hadn’t hedged their natural gas supply contract & was buying gas on the spot market went from being profitable to losing a ton of money on every single customer overnight. Once they’d burnt through their reserves, bankruptcy was inevitable. Previously, customers of a bankrupt supplier would be quietly taken up by other players in the market, but who wants to take on a £1000 / annum / customer liability right now? Absolutely no-one, unsurprisingly.
So now the government is looking at the gas prices & thinking: we /really/ don’t want to add £1500 to the average household bill at this point in time, with the economy in a fragile state after covid. Oh, plus the headlines we’re going to get over the winter if we don’t do something are going to be dire: Grannies freezing to death do not make good copy for the government after all. Hence the thinking that it’s probably cheaper in the medium term term to pay out the difference between spot gas costs & the price cap over this winter for those companies that go bankrupt because they failed to hedge effectively & then decide what to do longer term in the spring.
The other way the Gov't could have done it would be to let the new suppliers take on Bulb's customers and granted (Not loaned) the extra funding to make it worth their while.
Nice if you're a shareholder in one of the big 6...
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The idiotic energy price cap.
The cap is largely irrelevant. Think Northern Rock. The problem is buying short and selling long. When the short-term price peaks, Bulb (or NR) is stuffed. And as with Northern Rock, the political cost of letting consumers take the hit is too great.
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
The cap certainly isn't irrelevant, if there was no cap the customers could be moved to the rest of the big 6 on a SVT which would allow them to run at a normal profit.
These Cos should have some hedging in place though. Bit of the old risk management. To me it looks like they more took an agricultural punt on the market. Eg back when yield curves were steep and positive some operators would just lend long and borrow short and so long as things stayed stable they'd count the profits and pretend they were smart.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The idiotic energy price cap.
The cap is largely irrelevant. Think Northern Rock. The problem is buying short and selling long. When the short-term price peaks, Bulb (or NR) is stuffed. And as with Northern Rock, the political cost of letting consumers take the hit is too great.
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
The cap certainly isn't irrelevant, if there was no cap the customers could be moved to the rest of the big 6 on a SVT which would allow them to run at a normal profit.
If the cap were the cause, all the suppliers would have gone bust. The problem is that, as with Northern Rock, the failed companies were buying in the short-term markets but selling to consumers at prices fixed over the long term.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The idiotic energy price cap.
The cap is largely irrelevant. Think Northern Rock. The problem is buying short and selling long. When the short-term price peaks, Bulb (or NR) is stuffed. And as with Northern Rock, the political cost of letting consumers take the hit is too great.
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
The cap certainly isn't irrelevant, if there was no cap the customers could be moved to the rest of the big 6 on a SVT which would allow them to run at a normal profit.
These Cos should have some hedging in place though. Bit of the old risk management. To me it looks like they more took an agricultural punt on the market. Eg back when yield curves were steep and positive some operators would just lend long and borrow short and so long as things stayed stable they'd count the profits and pretend they were smart.
On the news just now they announced that a 5th person has been arrested in France Re the boat people who died.
How is it that the French authorities can within 24 hours arrest 5 people, they must have enough evidence of their involvement, and not use that intelligence they must have had to arrest them before on people trafficking offences?
It’s another key question I have is why does there not seem to be a big enough intelligence effort to infiltrate the gangs or process to stop these gangs in the same way they target drugs gangs?
France is following a perfectly sane policy (and which is the same as the policy in both Switzerland and Norway) of encouraging asylum seekers to self deport.
If an asylum seeker in Northern Ireland was walking towards the Irish border, should we tackle him to the ground to prevent him leaving the country?
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The idiotic energy price cap.
The cap is largely irrelevant. Think Northern Rock. The problem is buying short and selling long. When the short-term price peaks, Bulb (or NR) is stuffed. And as with Northern Rock, the political cost of letting consumers take the hit is too great.
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
The cap isn't irrelevant. Suppose you are supplying 1m homes and you are told to supply another 200,000? How do you do that except by buying at the current variable market rate.
Now Bulb may have had a strange (to you) business model of dynamic price changes to reflect the current market price but 1.7million customers liked that business model, it wasn't illegal and it made sense to people who I suspect were market savvy.
The issue really is a very simple one, the cap needs to reflect current market prices and it very clearly doesn't - and equally those people who are happy to be on a dynamic pricing model should have been left on it sans cap.
Interesting. I didn't know that Bulb sold at very variable rates. The cap basically makes their model impossible.
Yes the genuine refugees do that. That's kind of the point.
It would be interesting, though difficult, to see an unbiased analysis of why a minority do press on to the UK. For the benefits? Hardly - benefits are much more generous elsewhere. Because they speak some English and reckon they've got a better chance here? Possibly, but pay a fortune and risk death for that? Because they know others here and feel that would make life better?
The implication that taking risks to get here suggests they aren't genuine is a non-sequitur. Yes, step 1 is to get out of a hell-hole, and arrive in, say, Greece. But if you don't speak Greek or know any Greeks, and you do speak English and know someone in London, then step 2 may be to try to get here. That doesn't invalidate step 1.
There is a big undocumented economy in the UK compared to most European countries.
There are a lot of things that the government in this country just don't seem to be bothered about. This is one of them.
So the French know Global Britain’s black economy is what pulls the migrates across the world into inflatable boats, the migrants know it, the only people being hoodwinked here are UK electorate thinking their government has a tough policy?
Thats what the government should focus on. Tackling the black economy. Shutting down any sweat shops and dodgy nail bars.
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
Wait till you see how much No has lost since the 2014 referendum.
Quite. 46/86 is 53%. Which is down. Margin of 7 percentage points or so as opposed to 10 in 2014.
The point, guys, is that no-one is interested in IndyRef, whatever their theoretical inclinations are if there was one.
Not gonna happen.
Eventually Nicola will depart the stage, as will Boris.
And yet here you are commenting on it. Since you’ve been predicting Sturgeon will be leaving daily and twice on a Tuesday since last year, can we call you Burgodamus?
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The idiotic energy price cap.
The cap is largely irrelevant. Think Northern Rock. The problem is buying short and selling long. When the short-term price peaks, Bulb (or NR) is stuffed. And as with Northern Rock, the political cost of letting consumers take the hit is too great.
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
The cap certainly isn't irrelevant, if there was no cap the customers could be moved to the rest of the big 6 on a SVT which would allow them to run at a normal profit.
These Cos should have some hedging in place though. Bit of the old risk management. To me it looks like they more took an agricultural punt on the market. Eg back when yield curves were steep and positive some operators would just lend long and borrow short and so long as things stayed stable they'd count the profits and pretend they were smart.
How can you effectively hedge if there's a cap ?
Futures, options, swaps, derivatives? Standard City stuff.
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The idiotic energy price cap.
The cap is largely irrelevant. Think Northern Rock. The problem is buying short and selling long. When the short-term price peaks, Bulb (or NR) is stuffed. And as with Northern Rock, the political cost of letting consumers take the hit is too great.
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
The cap certainly isn't irrelevant, if there was no cap the customers could be moved to the rest of the big 6 on a SVT which would allow them to run at a normal profit.
These Cos should have some hedging in place though. Bit of the old risk management. To me it looks like they more took an agricultural punt on the market. Eg back when yield curves were steep and positive some operators would just lend long and borrow short and so long as things stayed stable they'd count the profits and pretend they were smart.
How can you effectively hedge if there's a cap ?
Futures, options, swaps, derivatives? Standard City stuff.
Do you think that's what the Big 6 have done and that's why they are all still trading? Or could it be that they can borrow for longer than the smaller companies?
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
Because the customers still need to be provided with and pay for their Gas and Electric usage and no-one else is in a position to either do so and accept the risk of doing so.
This is the direct consequence of a cap being set below market rates
No, it's a direct consequence of a bunch of chancers exploiting a deregulated market and failing to hedge their costs when their revenues were capped.
The proper suppliers have played a smarter game.
But the cap makes it impossible for the 'proper suppliers' to take on the customers of your bunch of chancers.
Why should they take them on? They have hedged based on their requirements for their own customers, not somebody else's.
Of course, I advocate nationalised utility suppliers, like we used to have. Providing a public service in the supply of essential energy supplies. Not operating a bloody casino.
I expect that those who set up the suppliers with the oh so clever names made sure that they trousered plenty of cash before the brown stuff hit the fan and the taxpayer is, yet again, left to wipe up the mess.
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The idiotic energy price cap.
The cap is largely irrelevant. Think Northern Rock. The problem is buying short and selling long. When the short-term price peaks, Bulb (or NR) is stuffed. And as with Northern Rock, the political cost of letting consumers take the hit is too great.
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
The cap isn't irrelevant. Suppose you are supplying 1m homes and you are told to supply another 200,000? How do you do that except by buying at the current variable market rate.
Now Bulb may have had a strange (to you) business model of dynamic price changes to reflect the current market price but 1.7million customers liked that business model, it wasn't illegal and it made sense to people who I suspect were market savvy.
The issue really is a very simple one, the cap needs to reflect current market prices and it very clearly doesn't - and equally those people who are happy to be on a dynamic pricing model should have been left on it sans cap.
Interesting. I didn't know that Bulb sold at very variable rates. The cap basically makes their model impossible.
Different situation to the unhedged cowboys.
Same situation. If you sell to consumers over the long term at any price below the cap, you need to make sure you can buy the stuff at lower prices over the same long term.
A rich selection of local by-elections today. Firstly we have the Conservative defence in the North Yorkshire PCC. Then there are Labour defences in Basildon, Halton, Newcastle under Lyme, Nuneaton and Bedworth. In Wandsworth there is a WIA elected as Labour defence. There are Con defences in Hambledon, Tunbridge Wells, and West Suffolk. The Lib Dems have a single defence in Wirral. Finally there the the unusual ones ( some very unusual!), In Allerdale there is a Non-Aligned defence; in Lancaster an Ind elected as Labour defence; and in Wigan a Ind defence after months of legal argument.
Yes the genuine refugees do that. That's kind of the point.
It would be interesting, though difficult, to see an unbiased analysis of why a minority do press on to the UK. For the benefits? Hardly - benefits are much more generous elsewhere. Because they speak some English and reckon they've got a better chance here? Possibly, but pay a fortune and risk death for that? Because they know others here and feel that would make life better?
The implication that taking risks to get here suggests they aren't genuine is a non-sequitur. Yes, step 1 is to get out of a hell-hole, and arrive in, say, Greece. But if you don't speak Greek or know any Greeks, and you do speak English and know someone in London, then step 2 may be to try to get here. That doesn't invalidate step 1.
There is a big undocumented economy in the UK compared to most European countries.
There are a lot of things that the government in this country just don't seem to be bothered about. This is one of them.
So the French know Global Britain’s black economy is what pulls the migrates across the world into inflatable boats, the migrants know it, the only people being hoodwinked here are UK electorate thinking their government has a tough policy?
Thats what the government should focus on. Tackling the black economy. Shutting down any sweat shops and dodgy nail bars.
Remove the demand for illegal immigration.
It's always been the most sensible solution.
It's like the drug laws. We catch and severely punish the least competent and the unlucky, at best winnowing the herd, but none of it makes any difference whilst the demand for illegal drugs remains undiminished.
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
The actual Yes figure is 46.5% - which is above the 2014 referendum figure.
But of course you are muddling figures which include and which exclude DKs.
Professor Curtice would not be impressed.
It is 40% including DKs, so in terms of all voters below the 45% from 2014 as I said
Just to point out the fallacy in this particular variant of HYUFDomathics.
In an election or referendum, the DKs are ignored.
To generate an opinion poll result comparable to an election, the DKs have to be excluded fromt he calculation. So only the 40 percentage points for Yes and the 46 percentage points for No are counted.
The percentages haver to be recalculated eg 40 divided by (40 plus 46) gives 46 and a half true percent. Which is up from 2014.
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
Wait till you see how much No has lost since the 2014 referendum.
Quite. 46/86 is 53%. Which is down. Margin of 7 percentage points or so as opposed to 10 in 2014.
The point, guys, is that no-one is interested in IndyRef, whatever their theoretical inclinations are if there was one.
Not gonna happen.
Eventually Nicola will depart the stage, as will Boris.
And yet here you are commenting on it. Since you’ve been predicting Sturgeon will be leaving daily and twice on a Tuesday since last year, can we call you Burgodamus?
I don't think most commentators south of the wall get it - I certainly didn't until I moved here.
The SNP government is popular, largely seen as competent and well-meaning, and is faced by opposition parties in regular disarray.
In May we had an election where the government was elected to a 4th term. On a record turnout. With a record number of votes cast for the SNP, an 18% increase on their 2016 vote which was a 13% increase on their 2011 vote. Its phenomenal.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The idiotic energy price cap.
The cap is largely irrelevant. Think Northern Rock. The problem is buying short and selling long. When the short-term price peaks, Bulb (or NR) is stuffed. And as with Northern Rock, the political cost of letting consumers take the hit is too great.
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
The cap certainly isn't irrelevant, if there was no cap the customers could be moved to the rest of the big 6 on a SVT which would allow them to run at a normal profit.
These Cos should have some hedging in place though. Bit of the old risk management. To me it looks like they more took an agricultural punt on the market. Eg back when yield curves were steep and positive some operators would just lend long and borrow short and so long as things stayed stable they'd count the profits and pretend they were smart.
How can you effectively hedge if there's a cap ?
If prices rocket miles above the cap and stay there for ages all companies without big reserves will go bust. But those with some hedging in place - eg forward buy contracts - have a degree of protection and have bought themselves time. It seems some of these outfits neglected to do any of this, hence are front of the queue for falling over.
Anyway, today is Elimination of Violence Against Women Day, I am told.
I am not, on the whole, a fan of all these "Days".
But it is worth remembering that, as of today, in Britain so far this year 127 women have been killed.
328 days of the year. 127 women killed.
1 woman killed every two and a half days.
Most do not even make the local let alone national news. If this number were killed in one go, we'd never hear the end of it. But one here and there all over the country every few days, most in domestic settings, most by people known to them, overwhelmingly by men - well they just become routine, part of the daily background, unknown, forgotten and not cared enough about for anyone to do anything effective to understand why this happens and what can be done to change it.
And this rate of killing is broadly the same year after year.
Let's compare it to the 20 years the British Army spent in Afghanistan - a largely pointless undertaking, mostly remembered for the sad convoys through Wootten Bassett and people paying their respects.
457 soldiers killed, 405 through enemy action. Ca. 23 a year.
I do not diminish their sacrifice or the loss their loved ones suffer.
But these women too have a name and people who loved them and miss them and this weary acceptance of their deaths really will not do.
Still, we have a "Day", I suppose. Must we be content just with that?
On topic, the most interesting thing is so few voters switching between the two main parties.
To me that is to be expected. The voter who jumps between the two is a rare beast. Apparent red-blue swings are the superficial reading of a multitude of more complex movements in voting intention.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The idiotic energy price cap.
The cap is largely irrelevant. Think Northern Rock. The problem is buying short and selling long. When the short-term price peaks, Bulb (or NR) is stuffed. And as with Northern Rock, the political cost of letting consumers take the hit is too great.
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
The cap certainly isn't irrelevant, if there was no cap the customers could be moved to the rest of the big 6 on a SVT which would allow them to run at a normal profit.
These Cos should have some hedging in place though. Bit of the old risk management. To me it looks like they more took an agricultural punt on the market. Eg back when yield curves were steep and positive some operators would just lend long and borrow short and so long as things stayed stable they'd count the profits and pretend they were smart.
How can you effectively hedge if there's a cap ?
If you can't hedge below the cap, you exit the market.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
Because the customers still need to be provided with and pay for their Gas and Electric usage and no-one else is in a position to either do so and accept the risk of doing so.
This is the direct consequence of a cap being set below market rates
No, it's a direct consequence of a bunch of chancers exploiting a deregulated market and failing to hedge their costs when their revenues were capped.
The proper suppliers have played a smarter game.
But the cap makes it impossible for the 'proper suppliers' to take on the customers of your bunch of chancers.
Why should they take them on? They have hedged based on their requirements for their own customers, not somebody else's.
Of course, I advocate nationalised utility suppliers, like we used to have. Providing a public service in the supply of essential energy supplies. Not operating a bloody casino.
I expect that those who set up the suppliers with the oh so clever names made sure that they trousered plenty of cash before the brown stuff hit the fan and the taxpayer is, yet again, left to wipe up the mess.
The privatised energy ‘system’ is tragedy played as farce. Which raving idiot decided that having a bunch of fake suppliers competing with each to supply exactly the same stream of energy, which is in fact supplied by somebody else, was ever a good idea?
I’m now on my fourth fake cowboy ‘supplier’ in 12 months. Sick of emails, bills and meter readings. It’s the definition of boring chores.
On topic, the most interesting thing is so few voters switching between the two main parties.
To me that is to be expected. The voter who jumps between the two is a rare beast. Apparent red-blue swings are the superficial reading of a multitude of more complex movements in voting intention.
Really - although I'm a natural Lib Dem voter except when I lived with my parents my vote has been Labour / Tory based on who I perceive to be the least worst option.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The idiotic energy price cap.
The cap is largely irrelevant. Think Northern Rock. The problem is buying short and selling long. When the short-term price peaks, Bulb (or NR) is stuffed. And as with Northern Rock, the political cost of letting consumers take the hit is too great.
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
The cap isn't irrelevant. Suppose you are supplying 1m homes and you are told to supply another 200,000? How do you do that except by buying at the current variable market rate.
Now Bulb may have had a strange (to you) business model of dynamic price changes to reflect the current market price but 1.7million customers liked that business model, it wasn't illegal and it made sense to people who I suspect were market savvy.
The issue really is a very simple one, the cap needs to reflect current market prices and it very clearly doesn't - and equally those people who are happy to be on a dynamic pricing model should have been left on it sans cap.
Interesting. I didn't know that Bulb sold at very variable rates. The cap basically makes their model impossible.
Different situation to the unhedged cowboys.
Same situation. If you sell to consumers over the long term at any price below the cap, you need to make sure you can buy the stuff at lower prices over the same long term.
Lets say all the companies buying gas have hedged to buy long at a capped cost.
The problem at the moment is lack of supply. Who gets cut off first?
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The idiotic energy price cap.
The cap is largely irrelevant. Think Northern Rock. The problem is buying short and selling long. When the short-term price peaks, Bulb (or NR) is stuffed. And as with Northern Rock, the political cost of letting consumers take the hit is too great.
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
The cap certainly isn't irrelevant, if there was no cap the customers could be moved to the rest of the big 6 on a SVT which would allow them to run at a normal profit.
These Cos should have some hedging in place though. Bit of the old risk management. To me it looks like they more took an agricultural punt on the market. Eg back when yield curves were steep and positive some operators would just lend long and borrow short and so long as things stayed stable they'd count the profits and pretend they were smart.
How can you effectively hedge if there's a cap ?
Futures, options, swaps, derivatives? Standard City stuff.
Do you think that's what the Big 6 have done and that's why they are all still trading? Or could it be that they can borrow for longer than the smaller companies?
I believe the older, wiser companies have indeed hedged.
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
It has gone bust, but with too many liabilities for any other business to take it on without a huge loss, and if they shut it down now, consumers will get shafted. So the government has to take the hit.
It's not really 'the government' taking the hit though, is it? Surely it's either energy bill payers, taxpayers, or both?
Yes taxpayers are subsidising Bulb customers to the tune of £1000 apiece (less x% to cover payroll, operating costs and fees for Bulb employees and adminstrators). This is to buy time for the government while it figures out what to do about the surge in gas prices when the cap comes around for its next review in April.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
Because the customers still need to be provided with and pay for their Gas and Electric usage and no-one else is in a position to either do so and accept the risk of doing so.
This is the direct consequence of a cap being set below market rates
No, it's a direct consequence of a bunch of chancers exploiting a deregulated market and failing to hedge their costs when their revenues were capped.
The proper suppliers have played a smarter game.
But the cap makes it impossible for the 'proper suppliers' to take on the customers of your bunch of chancers.
Why should they take them on? They have hedged based on their requirements for their own customers, not somebody else's.
Of course, I advocate nationalised utility suppliers, like we used to have. Providing a public service in the supply of essential energy supplies. Not operating a bloody casino.
I expect that those who set up the suppliers with the oh so clever names made sure that they trousered plenty of cash before the brown stuff hit the fan and the taxpayer is, yet again, left to wipe up the mess.
The privatised energy ‘system’ is tragedy played as farce. Which raving idiot decided that having a bunch of fake suppliers competing with each to supply exactly the same stream of energy, which is in fact supplied by somebody else, was ever a good idea?
Nationalise it FFS.
I remember when utilities, the railways, car manufacturers et al were "nationalised". Also, more laughably known as "in public ownership". They were all totally and utterly shit. And sorry, for all their faults, much much shitter than they are today. The man in Whitehall really does not know best.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
There are massive amounts of gas out there, the problem is that the marginal supplier (US shale gas) stopped drilling at the start of the pandemic.
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
The actual Yes figure is 46.5% - which is above the 2014 referendum figure.
But of course you are muddling figures which include and which exclude DKs.
Professor Curtice would not be impressed.
It is 40% including DKs, so in terms of all voters below the 45% from 2014 as I said
Here we go again. So you agree that a majority do not explicitly support the Union?
The majority explicitly supported the Union in 2014 in a once in a generation referendum and this Tory government as long as it remains in power will not allow another indyref2 for at least a generation until 2014 has elapsed
On the news just now they announced that a 5th person has been arrested in France Re the boat people who died.
How is it that the French authorities can within 24 hours arrest 5 people, they must have enough evidence of their involvement, and not use that intelligence they must have had to arrest them before on people trafficking offences?
It’s another key question I have is why does there not seem to be a big enough intelligence effort to infiltrate the gangs or process to stop these gangs in the same way they target drugs gangs?
France is following a perfectly sane policy (and which is the same as the policy in both Switzerland and Norway) of encouraging asylum seekers to self deport.
If an asylum seeker in Northern Ireland was walking towards the Irish border, should we tackle him to the ground to prevent him leaving the country?
If Northern Ireland became a magnet to migrants as a stepping stone to getting into the Republic and the build up of migrants was causing problems in Northern Ireland the surely the best thing to do would be to tackle the migrant and every other one, remove the idea that it’s a stepping stone to RoI and then other migrants might think, “hang on there isn’t much point massing in Northern Ireland anymore as the buggers keep arresting us and sending us back home”.
So whilst it’s initially harder work to deal with the problem the longer term benefits are worth it.
I know it’s a bit of a crap analogy but it would be like the Dutch police saying they aren’t going to stop drug traffickers from loading ships to the UK with drugs because the drugs are the UK’s problem when they get there - that’s true however the knock on effect would be that it draws more and more players to the Netherlands to traffick drugs to the UK as they won’t be dealt with and then you get the associated problems in the Netherlands of increased rival drug gangs etc.
If they find a way to make it pointless/impossible to send drugs from the Netherlands then there is less pull to drugs gangs to be based there for the purpose of trafficking to the UK thus reducing their own problems.
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
The actual Yes figure is 46.5% - which is above the 2014 referendum figure.
But of course you are muddling figures which include and which exclude DKs.
Professor Curtice would not be impressed.
It is 40% including DKs, so in terms of all voters below the 45% from 2014 as I said
Here we go again. So you agree that a majority do not explicitly support the Union?
The majority explicitly supported the Union in 2014 in a once in a generation referendum and this Tory government as long as it remains in power will not allow another indyref2 for at least a generation until 2014 has elapsed
You just don't want to admit you made a crass schoolboy error with your stats.
On the news just now they announced that a 5th person has been arrested in France Re the boat people who died.
How is it that the French authorities can within 24 hours arrest 5 people, they must have enough evidence of their involvement, and not use that intelligence they must have had to arrest them before on people trafficking offences?
It’s another key question I have is why does there not seem to be a big enough intelligence effort to infiltrate the gangs or process to stop these gangs in the same way they target drugs gangs?
France is following a perfectly sane policy (and which is the same as the policy in both Switzerland and Norway) of encouraging asylum seekers to self deport.
If an asylum seeker in Northern Ireland was walking towards the Irish border, should we tackle him to the ground to prevent him leaving the country?
Is this an Essay question, or were you really expecting a quick answer?
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
The actual Yes figure is 46.5% - which is above the 2014 referendum figure.
But of course you are muddling figures which include and which exclude DKs.
Professor Curtice would not be impressed.
It is 40% including DKs, so in terms of all voters below the 45% from 2014 as I said
Here we go again. So you agree that a majority do not explicitly support the Union?
The majority explicitly supported the Union in 2014 in a once in a generation referendum and this Tory government as long as it remains in power will not allow another indyref2 for at least a generation until 2014 has elapsed
You just don't want to admit you made a crass schoolboy error with your stats.
Time to see a nice Deltic photo, I think.
No error at all.
45% of all voters voted Yes in 2014, only 40% of all voters back Yes now amongst all voters, a disaster for Sturgeon
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The idiotic energy price cap.
The cap is largely irrelevant. Think Northern Rock. The problem is buying short and selling long. When the short-term price peaks, Bulb (or NR) is stuffed. And as with Northern Rock, the political cost of letting consumers take the hit is too great.
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
The cap isn't irrelevant. Suppose you are supplying 1m homes and you are told to supply another 200,000? How do you do that except by buying at the current variable market rate.
Now Bulb may have had a strange (to you) business model of dynamic price changes to reflect the current market price but 1.7million customers liked that business model, it wasn't illegal and it made sense to people who I suspect were market savvy.
The issue really is a very simple one, the cap needs to reflect current market prices and it very clearly doesn't - and equally those people who are happy to be on a dynamic pricing model should have been left on it sans cap.
Interesting. I didn't know that Bulb sold at very variable rates. The cap basically makes their model impossible.
Different situation to the unhedged cowboys.
Same situation. If you sell to consumers over the long term at any price below the cap, you need to make sure you can buy the stuff at lower prices over the same long term.
Lets say all the companies buying gas have hedged to buy long at a capped cost.
The problem at the moment is lack of supply. Who gets cut off first?
Industrial users - initially those on interruptible contracts.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
Because the customers still need to be provided with and pay for their Gas and Electric usage and no-one else is in a position to either do so and accept the risk of doing so.
This is the direct consequence of a cap being set below market rates
No, it's a direct consequence of a bunch of chancers exploiting a deregulated market and failing to hedge their costs when their revenues were capped.
The proper suppliers have played a smarter game.
But the cap makes it impossible for the 'proper suppliers' to take on the customers of your bunch of chancers.
Why should they take them on? They have hedged based on their requirements for their own customers, not somebody else's.
Of course, I advocate nationalised utility suppliers, like we used to have. Providing a public service in the supply of essential energy supplies. Not operating a bloody casino.
I expect that those who set up the suppliers with the oh so clever names made sure that they trousered plenty of cash before the brown stuff hit the fan and the taxpayer is, yet again, left to wipe up the mess.
The privatised energy ‘system’ is tragedy played as farce. Which raving idiot decided that having a bunch of fake suppliers competing with each to supply exactly the same stream of energy, which is in fact supplied by somebody else, was ever a good idea?
I’m now on my fourth fake cowboy ‘supplier’ in 12 months. Sick of emails, bills and meter readings. It’s the definition of boring chores.
Nationalise it FFS.
Yes, if the product is standard and essential, and if a big supplier of it can't be allowed to go bust in the normal way of a failed commercial enterprise, this is a pointer to something that at the very least should be strongly considered for public ownership. By which I mean the question should be flipped to be, what compelling reason is there for this to be in the private sector?
Labour only up 3% on the general election and the LDs actually down 2%. Interesting, after nearly 12 years of Conservative or Conservative-led government.
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
The actual Yes figure is 46.5% - which is above the 2014 referendum figure.
But of course you are muddling figures which include and which exclude DKs.
Professor Curtice would not be impressed.
It is 40% including DKs, so in terms of all voters below the 45% from 2014 as I said
Just to point out the fallacy in this particular variant of HYUFDomathics.
In an election or referendum, the DKs are ignored.
To generate an opinion poll result comparable to an election, the DKs have to be excluded fromt he calculation. So only the 40 percentage points for Yes and the 46 percentage points for No are counted.
The percentages haver to be recalculated eg 40 divided by (40 plus 46) gives 46 and a half true percent. Which is up from 2014.
No they don't, indeed in 2014 most DKs went No giving No an even bigger lead than final polls.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The idiotic energy price cap.
The cap is largely irrelevant. Think Northern Rock. The problem is buying short and selling long. When the short-term price peaks, Bulb (or NR) is stuffed. And as with Northern Rock, the political cost of letting consumers take the hit is too great.
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
The cap isn't irrelevant. Suppose you are supplying 1m homes and you are told to supply another 200,000? How do you do that except by buying at the current variable market rate.
Now Bulb may have had a strange (to you) business model of dynamic price changes to reflect the current market price but 1.7million customers liked that business model, it wasn't illegal and it made sense to people who I suspect were market savvy.
The issue really is a very simple one, the cap needs to reflect current market prices and it very clearly doesn't - and equally those people who are happy to be on a dynamic pricing model should have been left on it sans cap.
Interesting. I didn't know that Bulb sold at very variable rates. The cap basically makes their model impossible.
Different situation to the unhedged cowboys.
Same situation. If you sell to consumers over the long term at any price below the cap, you need to make sure you can buy the stuff at lower prices over the same long term.
Lets say all the companies buying gas have hedged to buy long at a capped cost.
The problem at the moment is lack of supply. Who gets cut off first?
Industrial users - initially those on interruptible contracts.
German industry is increasingly worried about this, loads of them expect to have to shut down in December and January because gas supplies will be diverted to heating people's houses.
When we people say we have to work with the French, are we going to send in riot police to help the Gendarmes break up makeshift camps in Dunkirk? That seems to be what being a "transit country" as Macron just described it means.. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-59410982
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
Because the customers still need to be provided with and pay for their Gas and Electric usage and no-one else is in a position to either do so and accept the risk of doing so.
This is the direct consequence of a cap being set below market rates
No, it's a direct consequence of a bunch of chancers exploiting a deregulated market and failing to hedge their costs when their revenues were capped.
The proper suppliers have played a smarter game.
But the cap makes it impossible for the 'proper suppliers' to take on the customers of your bunch of chancers.
Why should they take them on? They have hedged based on their requirements for their own customers, not somebody else's.
Of course, I advocate nationalised utility suppliers, like we used to have. Providing a public service in the supply of essential energy supplies. Not operating a bloody casino.
I expect that those who set up the suppliers with the oh so clever names made sure that they trousered plenty of cash before the brown stuff hit the fan and the taxpayer is, yet again, left to wipe up the mess.
The privatised energy ‘system’ is tragedy played as farce. Which raving idiot decided that having a bunch of fake suppliers competing with each to supply exactly the same stream of energy, which is in fact supplied by somebody else, was ever a good idea?
Nationalise it FFS.
I remember when utilities, the railways, car manufacturers et al were "nationalised". Also, more laughably known as "in public ownership". They were all totally and utterly shit. And sorry, for all their faults, much much shitter than they are today. The man in Whitehall really does not know best.
If you don't me asking, how old are you - there's a generation; and I'd include myself in this being 40 that has no idea how good or bad stuff was under nationalisation because we've never simply never experienced it.
Again no comment on the virtues or otherwise of nationalisation vs privatisation - just a note that younger people will have any clue who the likes of Red Robbo and Scargill were.
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
Because the customers still need to be provided with and pay for their Gas and Electric usage and no-one else is in a position to either do so and accept the risk of doing so.
This is the direct consequence of a cap being set below market rates
No, it's a direct consequence of a bunch of chancers exploiting a deregulated market and failing to hedge their costs when their revenues were capped.
The proper suppliers have played a smarter game.
But the cap makes it impossible for the 'proper suppliers' to take on the customers of your bunch of chancers.
Why should they take them on? They have hedged based on their requirements for their own customers, not somebody else's.
Of course, I advocate nationalised utility suppliers, like we used to have. Providing a public service in the supply of essential energy supplies. Not operating a bloody casino.
I expect that those who set up the suppliers with the oh so clever names made sure that they trousered plenty of cash before the brown stuff hit the fan and the taxpayer is, yet again, left to wipe up the mess.
The privatised energy ‘system’ is tragedy played as farce. Which raving idiot decided that having a bunch of fake suppliers competing with each to supply exactly the same stream of energy, which is in fact supplied by somebody else, was ever a good idea?
I’m now on my fourth fake cowboy ‘supplier’ in 12 months. Sick of emails, bills and meter readings. It’s the definition of boring chores.
Nationalise it FFS.
The issue is the energy price cap, companies are unable to charge the market rate, Bulb specifically only has a single standard variable rate tariff. The reason they went bankrupt is because they were unable to push that variable rate up to the market rate for gas. Get rid of the price cap and a lot of the problems in the sector go away. It was and remains a terrible policy. It was shit what Ed Miliband proposed it and it was shit when Theresa May implemented it and it's shit today. A completely unnecessary distortion of the market that will simply see companies gold under the weight of losses vs wholesale price gas.
On the news just now they announced that a 5th person has been arrested in France Re the boat people who died.
How is it that the French authorities can within 24 hours arrest 5 people, they must have enough evidence of their involvement, and not use that intelligence they must have had to arrest them before on people trafficking offences?
It’s another key question I have is why does there not seem to be a big enough intelligence effort to infiltrate the gangs or process to stop these gangs in the same way they target drugs gangs?
France is following a perfectly sane policy (and which is the same as the policy in both Switzerland and Norway) of encouraging asylum seekers to self deport.
If an asylum seeker in Northern Ireland was walking towards the Irish border, should we tackle him to the ground to prevent him leaving the country?
Yes, we should and would tackle him, if he was carrying a child and crossing potentially lethal water
That's the difference. The French are callously allowing children to die, to rid themselves of a problem. There are videos of armed police standing by, in broad daylight, doing nothing, as the migrants climb into the boats - with kids
The cops claim they are intimidated by "the numbers" but it is bollocks. They have guns, the migrants don't.
Sure they can't stop every boat, but they aren't even trying
Labour only up 3% on the general election and the LDs actually down 2%. Interesting, after nearly 12 years of Conservative or Conservative-led government.
For the benefit of comparing like with like
14 to 19 Oct Kantar had it 39% 34% 8 23-27 Sept 43% 30% 11
The take out there is Kantar finding more Labour support each time they poll?
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
Because the customers still need to be provided with and pay for their Gas and Electric usage and no-one else is in a position to either do so and accept the risk of doing so.
This is the direct consequence of a cap being set below market rates
No, it's a direct consequence of a bunch of chancers exploiting a deregulated market and failing to hedge their costs when their revenues were capped.
The proper suppliers have played a smarter game.
But the cap makes it impossible for the 'proper suppliers' to take on the customers of your bunch of chancers.
Why should they take them on? They have hedged based on their requirements for their own customers, not somebody else's.
Of course, I advocate nationalised utility suppliers, like we used to have. Providing a public service in the supply of essential energy supplies. Not operating a bloody casino.
I expect that those who set up the suppliers with the oh so clever names made sure that they trousered plenty of cash before the brown stuff hit the fan and the taxpayer is, yet again, left to wipe up the mess.
The privatised energy ‘system’ is tragedy played as farce. Which raving idiot decided that having a bunch of fake suppliers competing with each to supply exactly the same stream of energy, which is in fact supplied by somebody else, was ever a good idea?
Nationalise it FFS.
I remember when utilities, the railways, car manufacturers et al were "nationalised". Also, more laughably known as "in public ownership". They were all totally and utterly shit. And sorry, for all their faults, much much shitter than they are today. The man in Whitehall really does not know best.
In what way were gas, water and electric “shit” under public ownership? You turned on the light switch, the lights came on, similarly gas and water. The cost was reasonable: maybe some privatized suppliers have been cheaper since but you didn't have to keep searching out the best “deal” every year or two.
British Leyland I grant you, but I don’t recall the products of GM/Vauxhall or Chrysler/Talbot (whatever it became) being any much better than Austin-Morris-Rover in the 70s and 80s.
As to the trains, BR in its last years did seem to be getting it right: InterCity was profitable and cross-subsidized the other sectors, eithout the. Fleet renewal was underway too.
Maybe telecoms was best privatized though. Having your phone hard-wired into the wall seems unbelievable today!
Yes the genuine refugees do that. That's kind of the point.
It would be interesting, though difficult, to see an unbiased analysis of why a minority do press on to the UK. For the benefits? Hardly - benefits are much more generous elsewhere. Because they speak some English and reckon they've got a better chance here? Possibly, but pay a fortune and risk death for that? Because they know others here and feel that would make life better?
The implication that taking risks to get here suggests they aren't genuine is a non-sequitur. Yes, step 1 is to get out of a hell-hole, and arrive in, say, Greece. But if you don't speak Greek or know any Greeks, and you do speak English and know someone in London, then step 2 may be to try to get here. That doesn't invalidate step 1.
There is a big undocumented economy in the UK compared to most European countries.
On topic, the most interesting thing is so few voters switching between the two main parties.
To me that is to be expected. The voter who jumps between the two is a rare beast. Apparent red-blue swings are the superficial reading of a multitude of more complex movements in voting intention.
True, although when it's clear there's going to be a change of government, such as 1979, 1997 and 2010, you probably get a much higher percentage. So it's a sign that if anything changes at the next election it's likely to be in the direction of a hung parliament, although we knew that already.
On the news just now they announced that a 5th person has been arrested in France Re the boat people who died.
How is it that the French authorities can within 24 hours arrest 5 people, they must have enough evidence of their involvement, and not use that intelligence they must have had to arrest them before on people trafficking offences?
It’s another key question I have is why does there not seem to be a big enough intelligence effort to infiltrate the gangs or process to stop these gangs in the same way they target drugs gangs?
France is following a perfectly sane policy (and which is the same as the policy in both Switzerland and Norway) of encouraging asylum seekers to self deport.
If an asylum seeker in Northern Ireland was walking towards the Irish border, should we tackle him to the ground to prevent him leaving the country?
Yes, we should and would tackle him, if he was carrying a child and crossing potentially lethal water
That's the difference. The French are callously allowing children to die, to rid themselves of a problem. There are videos of armed police standing by, in broad daylight, doing nothing, as the migrants climb into the boats - with kids
The cops claim they are intimidated by "the numbers" but it is bollocks. They have guns, the migrants don't.
Sure they can't stop every boat, but they aren't even trying
Should is very different to would.
The idea that, in the absence of any kind of treaty requirement, the UK government would spend significant amounts of money preventing people it did not want here from leaving is for the fairies.
Pretty bloody ropey after my Moderna booster jab. Seriously sore and frozen arm, general malaise and fatigue. Much worse than AZ, which caused a tiny bit of tenderness in the shoulder...
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
Because the customers still need to be provided with and pay for their Gas and Electric usage and no-one else is in a position to either do so and accept the risk of doing so.
This is the direct consequence of a cap being set below market rates
No, it's a direct consequence of a bunch of chancers exploiting a deregulated market and failing to hedge their costs when their revenues were capped.
The proper suppliers have played a smarter game.
But the cap makes it impossible for the 'proper suppliers' to take on the customers of your bunch of chancers.
Why should they take them on? They have hedged based on their requirements for their own customers, not somebody else's.
Of course, I advocate nationalised utility suppliers, like we used to have. Providing a public service in the supply of essential energy supplies. Not operating a bloody casino.
I expect that those who set up the suppliers with the oh so clever names made sure that they trousered plenty of cash before the brown stuff hit the fan and the taxpayer is, yet again, left to wipe up the mess.
The privatised energy ‘system’ is tragedy played as farce. Which raving idiot decided that having a bunch of fake suppliers competing with each to supply exactly the same stream of energy, which is in fact supplied by somebody else, was ever a good idea?
Nationalise it FFS.
I remember when utilities, the railways, car manufacturers et al were "nationalised". Also, more laughably known as "in public ownership". They were all totally and utterly shit. And sorry, for all their faults, much much shitter than they are today. The man in Whitehall really does not know best.
Who said go back to those days? Do like the rest of Europe does - state owned commercial enterprises. EDF is nationalised.
Anyway, today is Elimination of Violence Against Women Day, I am told.
I am not, on the whole, a fan of all these "Days".
But it is worth remembering that, as of today, in Britain so far this year 127 women have been killed.
328 days of the year. 127 women killed.
1 woman killed every two and a half days.
Most do not even make the local let alone national news. If this number were killed in one go, we'd never hear the end of it. But one here and there all over the country every few days, most in domestic settings, most by people known to them, overwhelmingly by men - well they just become routine, part of the daily background, unknown, forgotten and not cared enough about for anyone to do anything effective to understand why this happens and what can be done to change it.
And this rate of killing is broadly the same year after year.
Let's compare it to the 20 years the British Army spent in Afghanistan - a largely pointless undertaking, mostly remembered for the sad convoys through Wootten Bassett and people paying their respects.
457 soldiers killed, 405 through enemy action. Ca. 23 a year.
I do not diminish their sacrifice or the loss their loved ones suffer.
But these women too have a name and people who loved them and miss them and this weary acceptance of their deaths really will not do.
Still, we have a "Day", I suppose. Must we be content just with that?
Or, I suppose, we could compare it with the roughly double number of male homicides over the same time. Do they get a "day"?
Anyway, today is Elimination of Violence Against Women Day, I am told.
I am not, on the whole, a fan of all these "Days".
But it is worth remembering that, as of today, in Britain so far this year 127 women have been killed.
328 days of the year. 127 women killed.
1 woman killed every two and a half days.
Most do not even make the local let alone national news. If this number were killed in one go, we'd never hear the end of it. But one here and there all over the country every few days, most in domestic settings, most by people known to them, overwhelmingly by men - well they just become routine, part of the daily background, unknown, forgotten and not cared enough about for anyone to do anything effective to understand why this happens and what can be done to change it.
And this rate of killing is broadly the same year after year.
Let's compare it to the 20 years the British Army spent in Afghanistan - a largely pointless undertaking, mostly remembered for the sad convoys through Wootten Bassett and people paying their respects.
457 soldiers killed, 405 through enemy action. Ca. 23 a year.
I do not diminish their sacrifice or the loss their loved ones suffer.
But these women too have a name and people who loved them and miss them and this weary acceptance of their deaths really will not do.
Still, we have a "Day", I suppose. Must we be content just with that?
How many men have been killed in the same period? I am not trying to be crass. Every murder is horrific in its own way, whether it is a knife fight among gangs, or a murdered wife at home. How about an Elimination of Violence against people day instead?
Jeez. £1.7bn of taxpayers money to keep bulb running.
Outrageous.
The solution is simple. Ditch the cap to keep these companies solvent. If the govt is going to spend money, it should be on protecting the poorest via UC, not directly subsidising energy bills.
The company has gone into “special administration”. I presume (but can’t find anywhere) that this means the shareholders have been wiped out as they would be in any company that goes into administration. The only difference here is that it’s being kept running in order that people continue to receive gas supply.
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Can somebody who understands this shit (ie not me, I chose my financial advisor because I approved of his car) explain why they can't just let this utterly pointless husk of a company go bust?
The idiotic energy price cap.
The cap is largely irrelevant. Think Northern Rock. The problem is buying short and selling long. When the short-term price peaks, Bulb (or NR) is stuffed. And as with Northern Rock, the political cost of letting consumers take the hit is too great.
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
With respect, I’m pretty much the opposite of a PB Tory and I think the cap is crap.
Either have a free energy market, sans cap, or nationalise it all.
We currently have the worst of all worlds.
As I said upthread, if the government is to throw taxpayers cash at the problem, it should be in the form of a UC boost for the poorest.
Comments
Sorry to have missed your post yesterday. Where does the 40% figure come from?
As a country we have a problem - gas prices have just spiked enormously, after being relatively stable for a decade or more. Many, many people rely on gas for heating & cooking. Keeping the gas flowing is therefore a matter of national security.
Clearly, the only long term solution is for gas prices to rise & people to shift off gas. But quadrupling everyone’s gas bills right now is going to cause havoc - I can see why the government has decided that re-nationalising the gas supply industry is the simplest & most effective option open to them in the short term.
Getting to Germany from France would be fairly trivial by comparison.
Because Boris has no identifiable political credo, it is hard to forecast what policies he will favour. Because Boris is weak on detail, he is liable to change his mind once policy implications are made clear.
Take the Paterson affair, which the FT cites, and we have a decision (on what seemed like a clever wheeze to get Boris off the hook) made by an Old Etonian cabal, with a u-turn once Boris was rumbled. The fact (if it is a fact) there are different groups inside Number 10 is irrelevant if they are barely involved.
This is the direct consequence of a cap being set below market rates
It is clear that since they are attempting to claim asylum *from* France, that France is a failed state. And we always invade failed states...
Anyone got a map of the French oil fields? - they do have some IIRC
With refugees I think there's a big problem in that the more you accept the more will come. They should be encouraged to stay at home and fix the mess they've made in their own countries. (Slightly tongue in cheek obviously but not completely)
It can be seen as a failure of regulation but apparently PB Tories only see these when Labour is in office. And the only reason for mentioning the cap is so the Tory spin team can blame Ed Miliband for Conservative legislation.
Now Bulb may have had a strange (to you) business model of dynamic price changes to reflect the current market price but 1.7million customers liked that business model, it wasn't illegal and it made sense to people who I suspect were market savvy.
The issue really is a very simple one, the cap needs to reflect current market prices and it very clearly doesn't - and equally those people who are happy to be on a dynamic pricing model should have been left on it sans cap.
The proper suppliers have played a smarter game.
Its not the reason why the Big 6 won't take on Bulb's customers on a SVT though.
Those are two facts that are not really in dispute. Perhaps if it was less dangerous it would be more even, though?
So you'd have to ban selling fixed price deals without hedging.
In 2019 (IIRC) the UK government had put in place a price cap on the price / therm gas companies could charge (mostly to prevent outrageous money grubbing by companies looking to exploit clients who’s only option was to be on pre-payment meters I think). As a result, any gas supply company who hadn’t hedged their natural gas supply contract & was buying gas on the spot market went from being profitable to losing a ton of money on every single customer overnight. Once they’d burnt through their reserves, bankruptcy was inevitable. Previously, customers of a bankrupt supplier would be quietly taken up by other players in the market, but who wants to take on a £1000 / annum / customer liability right now? Absolutely no-one, unsurprisingly.
So now the government is looking at the gas prices & thinking: we /really/ don’t want to add £1500 to the average household bill at this point in time, with the economy in a fragile state after covid. Oh, plus the headlines we’re going to get over the winter if we don’t do something are going to be dire: Grannies freezing to death do not make good copy for the government after all. Hence the thinking that it’s probably cheaper in the medium term term to pay out the difference between spot gas costs & the price cap over this winter for those companies that go bankrupt because they failed to hedge effectively & then decide what to do longer term in the spring.
North Korean sentenced to death after students caught watching Squid Game
Locals say rich parents were able to bribe authorities to spare a student from punishment.
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/korea/squidgame-11232021180155.html
Nice if you're a shareholder in one of the big 6...
If an asylum seeker in Northern Ireland was walking towards the Irish border, should we tackle him to the ground to prevent him leaving the country?
Different situation to the unhedged cowboys.
It's always been the most sensible solution.
Since you’ve been predicting Sturgeon will be leaving daily and twice on a Tuesday since last year, can we call you Burgodamus?
Of course, I advocate nationalised utility suppliers, like we used to have. Providing a public service in the supply of essential energy supplies. Not operating a bloody casino.
I expect that those who set up the suppliers with the oh so clever names made sure that they trousered plenty of cash before the brown stuff hit the fan and the taxpayer is, yet again, left to wipe up the mess.
The data that you were commenting on. Quoted in your post.
In an election or referendum, the DKs are ignored.
To generate an opinion poll result comparable to an election, the DKs have to be excluded fromt he calculation. So only the 40 percentage points for Yes and the 46 percentage points for No are counted.
The percentages haver to be recalculated eg 40 divided by (40 plus 46) gives 46 and a half true percent. Which is up from 2014.
The SNP government is popular, largely seen as competent and well-meaning, and is faced by opposition parties in regular disarray.
In May we had an election where the government was elected to a 4th term. On a record turnout. With a record number of votes cast for the SNP, an 18% increase on their 2016 vote which was a 13% increase on their 2011 vote. Its phenomenal.
So why would Sturgeon be going anywhere?
I am not, on the whole, a fan of all these "Days".
But it is worth remembering that, as of today, in Britain so far this year 127 women have been killed.
328 days of the year. 127 women killed.
1 woman killed every two and a half days.
Most do not even make the local let alone national news. If this number were killed in one go, we'd never hear the end of it. But one here and there all over the country every few days, most in domestic settings, most by people known to them, overwhelmingly by men - well they just become routine, part of the daily background, unknown, forgotten and not cared enough about for anyone to do anything effective to understand why this happens and what can be done to change it.
And this rate of killing is broadly the same year after year.
Let's compare it to the 20 years the British Army spent in Afghanistan - a largely pointless undertaking, mostly remembered for the sad convoys through Wootten Bassett and people paying their respects.
457 soldiers killed, 405 through enemy action. Ca. 23 a year.
I do not diminish their sacrifice or the loss their loved ones suffer.
But these women too have a name and people who loved them and miss them and this weary acceptance of their deaths really will not do.
Still, we have a "Day", I suppose. Must we be content just with that?
I’m now on my fourth fake cowboy ‘supplier’ in 12 months. Sick of emails, bills and meter readings. It’s the definition of boring chores.
Nationalise it FFS.
The problem at the moment is lack of supply. Who gets cut off first?
https://www.theenergyshop.com/energy-suppliers
Seems like there are still a surprisingly large number (around 40).
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/nyregion/anthony-broadwater-alice-sebold.html
LAB: 36% (+2)
LDEM: 10% (+2)
GRN: 5% (-3)
via
@Kantar
, 18 - 22 Nov
https://twitter.com/BritainElects/status/1463816123326115842?s=20
So whilst it’s initially harder work to deal with the problem the longer term benefits are worth it.
I know it’s a bit of a crap analogy but it would be like the Dutch police saying they aren’t going to stop drug traffickers from loading ships to the UK with drugs because the drugs are the UK’s problem when they get there - that’s true however the knock on effect would be that it draws more and more players to the Netherlands to traffick drugs to the UK as they won’t be dealt with and then you get the associated problems in the Netherlands of increased rival drug gangs etc.
If they find a way to make it pointless/impossible to send drugs from the Netherlands then there is less pull to drugs gangs to be based there for the purpose of trafficking to the UK thus reducing their own problems.
Time to see a nice Deltic photo, I think.
45% of all voters voted Yes in 2014, only 40% of all voters back Yes now amongst all voters, a disaster for Sturgeon
So to be accurate you have to include DKs
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-59410982
Again no comment on the virtues or otherwise of nationalisation vs privatisation - just a note that younger people will have any clue who the likes of Red Robbo and Scargill were.
That's the difference. The French are callously allowing children to die, to rid themselves of a problem. There are videos of armed police standing by, in broad daylight, doing nothing, as the migrants climb into the boats - with kids
The cops claim they are intimidated by "the numbers" but it is bollocks. They have guns, the migrants don't.
Sure they can't stop every boat, but they aren't even trying
14 to 19 Oct Kantar had it
39% 34% 8
23-27 Sept
43% 30% 11
The take out there is Kantar finding more Labour support each time they poll?
British Leyland I grant you, but I don’t recall the products of GM/Vauxhall or Chrysler/Talbot (whatever it became) being any much better than Austin-Morris-Rover in the 70s and 80s.
As to the trains, BR in its last years did seem to be getting it right: InterCity was profitable and cross-subsidized the other sectors, eithout the. Fleet renewal was underway too.
Maybe telecoms was best privatized though. Having your phone hard-wired into the wall seems unbelievable today!
The idea that, in the absence of any kind of treaty requirement, the UK government would spend significant amounts of money preventing people it did not want here from leaving is for the fairies.
Either have a free energy market, sans cap, or nationalise it all.
We currently have the worst of all worlds.
As I said upthread, if the government is to throw taxpayers cash at the problem, it should be in the form of a UC boost for the poorest.
https://twitter.com/kitty_donaldson/status/1463846830454812674?s=20