I don’t know how widely known the subject of Feed-In Tariffs (FITs) is, the green electricity that the public can generate from their own homes, put onto the Grid and make significant sums off the back of, all while reducing their own power bills. The approach forms just one small part of the innovative and creative fight against Climate Change and if you have a roof that fits the criteria and have the necessary cash then you should look into this in more detail. Well, that is save for the caveat that the lucrative opportunity looks set to be curtailed or even abolished when the scheme is reviewed in 2012.
Aside from questioning the logic of removing incentives to green energy, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a Government amending the projects of a previous Government. However, that is not where the story ends with these FITs and the new coalition.
As The Guardian points out, during the election campaign David Cameron pledged that:
“under a Conservative government, any micro-generation technologies that have already been installed … will be eligible for the new higher tariffs once they commence.”
However, Energy Secretary Chris Huhne has ruled out paying these “early pioneers” what was promised to them by the now Prime Minister citing value-for-money as the reason.
Now, I can understand a Government that is long in the tooth, short of ideas and overtaken by events reneging on pre-election pledges, witness Labour’s welcome hiking of income tax to 50% for example, but the most recent election was only in May and it is difficult to count how many election pledges have already been broken. Difficult, but I’ll have a go:
– Increasing VAT when Tories said they had no plans to and the Lib Dems vigorously campaigned against such a rise
– Repealing the Human Rights Act
– Protecting the Winter Fuel Allowance
– Building the Summary Care Record database of medical data
– Removing tax breaks for the computer games industry
– make it a criminal offence to possess or bring into the country illegal timber
This of course is to overlook the hugely significant proposals that are already being planned in our name without our having a chance to vote on it in a General Election:
– Scrapping child benefit
– 5 year fixed term Parliaments
– giving power of NHS budgets to GPs
– a referendum on the Alternative Vote (a voting system that no one party is in favour of)
– increasing fees for students
Of course, what is even more bonkers is that the Conservatives are sticking to the election promises that are the most ludicrous – paying for nuclear weapons that will never be used and introducing tax breaks for married couples.
This blog was meant to be positive and I guess the above doesn’t quite meet that criteria but this blogger is increasingly exasperated at the yawning disconnect between what was said (and not said) before the May election and what has gone on afterwards. It wouldn’t even be so bad if the Conservatives and Lib Dems hadn’t bolted on an extra year to the standard 4-year term that a Government typically gets in office ensuring that the public don’t get a say until 2015.
This of course is not surprising. In what was perhaps a pivotal point in the election campaign and certainly the moment I knew for sure that voters were being shortchanged was when the Insititute for Fiscal Studies released its report stating that the Conservatives had only identified where 17.7% of the cuts that it was proposing were going to fall.
One pre-election pledge that the Conservatives have made good on is urging the public to take part in the Big Society, a coming together of communities all across the country to ensure the right thing is done and we progress together. Wouldn’t it be a delicious irony if one of the first Big Society successes was a large protest against the non-delivery of pledges and the ramming through of policies that we never received a heads up on?
#1 by Lost Highlander on October 11, 2010 - 11:59 am
The simple answer NO
#2 by richard on October 11, 2010 - 10:12 pm
Election promises are made based on publicly-available data as to how much money is in the government’s kitty. The Labour government deliberately massaged the figures and this, together with their “scorched-earth policy” on public spending, means that the money that should have been available does not exist. Ergo, the coalition have to cut their clothes according to their cloth.
#3 by Jeff on October 11, 2010 - 10:49 pm
I’d say you’re half right there Richard as Labour dis make a right mess but I find it hard to believe that the Tory team didn’t have most of the financial facts at their disposal and at least 75% of their first 100 days ready to go. We were not consulted and that 17.7% from the IFS, not to mention poll figures tumblig for Tories and Lib dems, backs that up.
#4 by Phil Ruse on October 13, 2010 - 4:53 pm
The building of a summary care record of medical data for the NHS is one of those things I was instinctively against until I looked at what it actually meant.
It means, for example, that when my wife (who has a long medical history) visits her consultant she doesn’t then have to wait a month (or more) for the written records to be copied/typed up (how very 20th century!) and passed on to her GP before she can then discuss the course of treatment she has to undergo.
Or to give another example, it doesn’t rely on my mother who use to be a nurse happening to remember that the course of treatment given to her by her consultant might mean that the treatment just given her by her doctor might actually turn out to be very dangerous… in that example the records never “got” to the GP.
It’s when the databases get “linked” that we have to worry about civil liberties – there’s nothing wrong with building a database when none currently exists as long as the limits are known and adhered to.