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?

I know this blog has a raison d’etre of bettering the nation of Scotland but I’m going to briefly interrupt proceedings to post on London council elections. No wait, where are you going, come back! This’ll only take a moment…

The London Borough elections of 2010 saw 1,861 councillors elected to their posts. I don’t know what the expectations were for the Green Party in the UK’s capital but they returned 2 councillors which I would ordinarily have thought was a poor result but, from the little I know of how elections work here, I know infact that it was actually just an unfair result.

There is an upcoming by-election for nearby Kentish Town in the area of Camden next month and this could see the Green Party increase its number of councillors by 50% if it were to win. Labour are probably favourites and, were they to win, they would increase their representation in the city by 0.114%. A bit of a difference you could say.

Indeed, if one were to look at the 2010 election results as a whole they would see what an uphill struggle the Green Party is fighting against in a local context.

The Labour party won 876 councillors, the Conservatives 717, the Lib Dems 245 and the Greens, as I say, 2. This result was with 3,388,437 votes for Labour, 3,301,966 for the Conservatives, 2,094,530 for the Lib Dems and 443,498 for the Greens.

Put another way, Labour received 3,868 votes for every councillor position it won, the Conservatives received 4,605 votes for every councillor, the Lib Dems received 8,549 votes for every councillor and the Greens received a whopping 221,749 votes for every councillor.

All parties talk of wanting fairness, all parties talk of a new politics. So, not that I’m suggesting the local Green Party isn’t up for a challenge, but shouldn’t all the other parties just sit out this Kentish Town by-election and let an organic justice take place?

Sadly it doesn’t work that way so it’ll be an old-skool winner takes all affair in Kentish Town. Good thing the Greens believe fairness is worth fighting for because they have a battle on their hands on that score.

Source: Borough Council Election Results

With it now 93 days to Christmas, it is getting tantalisingly close to the day when we find out who has been a good girl or boy and suitably rewarded therein. I personally can’t wait for that bleary-eyed morning with a rotund, jovial man bearing his gifts of knowledge. Yes, that’s right, the Holyrood election 2011 is drawing ever nearer.

Above all else, the public deserves one thing from our representatives at election time and that is dividing lines. With the centre left a particularly crowded field it is difficult to see where, or even if, these dividing lines will open up between now and May. Indeed, I fear that the inertia that has crept in at Holyrood of late will result in personality rather than policies being the only real criterion for a disaffected public. That thought crystallised yesterday morning when I read this excerpt from The Herald’s coverage of the minimum pricing issue:

LibDem health spokesman Ross Finnie warned that there was a risk of an “entirely polarised debate” and that everything the SNP Government said on alcohol was “rubbish”.

There is no doubting that alcohol is a fight that Scotland is currently losing on many fronts; health-related, crime-related, education-related and even reputationally. It doesn’t take long for a Scotsman abroad to bear the brunt of a crass comment about his/her homeland and booze, with or without bumping into Prince Philip.

However, as Ross Finnie has pointed out, the two main parties are not close to reaching any agreement in this “polarised” debate and while the Lib Dem spokesman tries to portray himself as the reasonable alternative, he undermines that objective by bizarrely calling the Government’s proposals “rubbish” when they are, at the very least, reasonable and valid.

The Conservatives have their own valid argument, a libertarian approach that seems to revolve around some mythical ‘squaddie’ who has longed to come home from Afghanistan and tuck into some cut-price cider. The Greens, most impressively but inconspicuously of all, have looked at the SNP’s proposals, thought they looked fair enough and have been onboard ever since. Once again the silent heroes of the piece, if only there were more of them alongside Patrick and Robin.

Most parties have circled around this policy area, and many others, that they all agree need addressed but they have contrived to allow their personalities to get in the way of an optimal policy where everybody wins.

Will this be the template for the election campaign?

With the amount of money that Scotland will be given to spend over the coming years set to drop sharply, one can’t envisage that any of the parties will be able to pull together an attractive manifesto, not while balancing their numbers that is. This may well drag all commitments to a horribly vague middle-ground and leave the voter little choice.

There should be clear policy dividing lines on local taxation (SNP/Lib Dem – Local Income Tax, Greens – Land Value Tax, Tories/Labour – Council tax/to be decided) and minimum pricing if it remains an issue but I cannot envisage these topics being the main talking points of the election campaign. Cuts and jobs/economy are the main issues and all parties want less of the former and more of the latter. Not many dividing lines there.

One would expect the SNP to hold an advantage over the other parties with the mighty Salmond consistently leading polls that focus on party leaders. One could also argue that the SNP has had a relatively successful four years policy-wise so perhaps, with Labour so far ahead in the polls, I should not limit the crucial factor of the 2011 election to these two considerations.

The main personality question will depend on whether the main Opposition party, Labour, continues to oppose all spending cuts by the SNP Government or seeks to offer an alternative budget. To this end, January 2011 will be a crucial period as voting begins on the budget for 2011/12.

Was Labour to continue playing the politics of decrying every job loss, every project scrappage and every decrease in expenditure then the result of 2011 will depend on whether the public responds favourably to such a strategy.

Scotland would be best served by a substantive policy debate, not a squabbling contest built on inflated egos and unshakeable truculence, but I guess we’ll just wait and see which of the two awaits us.