Warm words

Sometimes it's difficult to know where to start with propaganda like this, but let's pick up the thread here ...

The government says its aim is to insulate every home in Britain by 2020 - and energy companies, councils and voluntary organisations will be making door-to-door visits in deprived areas to promote the scheme.

1. Nulab will be out of gummint in two years' time at the latest, by 2020 they'll be an unpleasant memory.

2. The poorest people live in council flats. If councils want to insulate their blocks of flats properly, then good luck to them. From the point of view of a tenant, with a concrete floor, walls and ceiling, there aren't any 'loft spaces' to insulate, and they probably can't afford double glazing (even if that were an economically rational thing to do, which it isn't in most cases).

3. Just look at the list of meddling quangocrats and lobbyists in that article who'll be slathering over this; Warm Front (the BBC try to throw you off the scent by not capitalising it, Warm Front themselves try and throw you off the scent by having a co.uk rather than a gov.uk URL); the people at the Benefits Agency who decide who does and who doesn't qualify for the means-tested £25 a week; councils and voluntary organisations who'll be making the visits; the manufacturers of double glazing and lagging who think they're in for a taxpayer-funded bonanza; Help The Aged; the trade unions (foremost Unite); the National Housing Federation, who "represent 1,300 not-for-profit housing associations in England and campaign for better housing and neighbourhoods" (some of the UK's biggest subsidy junkies who are keen to get the taxpayer to shovel yet more money at them to enable them to do up their properties) i.e. not to be confused with the Home Builders' Federation, who can see a pretty taxpayer billion or three rolling their way but were too polite to mention it.

4. "Door-to-door visits"? Hmmm, now why does that phrase fill me with dread?

The BBC don't appear to have included soundbites from their taxpayer funded chums at Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth, but there's only so much crap you can squeeze into one article, I suppose.

"Measures to target fuel poverty"

For a load of shit ideas dreamed up by a long list of quangos, see here.

Or, from the MW manifesto:

1. Scrap VAT on domestic fuel* (and possibly reduce other taxes thereon). That gets the cost down by 5% at a stroke.

2. Encourage/enable pensioners and welfare claimants to set up a low-cost, basic bank account (any bank that refuses to offer such accounts gets its banking licence withdrawn). Encourage them (i.e. tell them how much cheaper it is) to pay by DD rather than pre-payment meter. That gets the cost down by a further 16%. DD payments can be made weekly or monthly.

3. Replace Council Tax/SDLT etc. with a Property Bubble Tax, and replace means-tested old-age benefits with a Citizen's Pension, which would encourage** the one million pensioners below the poverty line who still live in a three-bedroom house to trade down into a smaller home.

* Actually, phase out VAT on everything, but this would go first.

** Or at least not discourage which is what means-tested benefits do - if you swap big house for small house-plus-pile of cash, you lose so much in Pensions Credit and Council Tax Benefit that it often isn't worth the hassle. And SDLT of course disourages mobility.