DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Sold down the river by weak watchdog

DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Sold down the river by weak watchdog

Energy watchdog Ofgem is supposed to defend consumers’ interests against predatory exploitation by the gas and electricity giants.

Too often, though, the regulator supinely bends the knee to an industry accused of obscene profiteering.

Yesterday, it did so again. 

At first glance, its plan to review the price cap every three months, not six, makes some sense.

Falls in energy prices could be passed on quicker – a huge help to families struggling with the cost of living crunch.

But the grim flipside is that this risks leaving customers dangerously vulnerable to unaffordable mid-winter bill hikes.

Energy watchdog Ofgem’s plans could help and hinder families who are struggling to pay their energy bills

On top of that, Ofgem’s proposals would discourage competition to offer cheaper tariffs – a blow to the consumer, but a lucrative godsend to the energy firms.

And if the watchdog really wanted to slash bills, wouldn’t it cut costly standing charges, including punishing green levies?

This is a capitulation by a weak regulator that has been asleep at the wheel when it was meant to be overseeing a dysfunctional but rapacious industry.

It insists it is standing up for us. 

But its appeasement of the power giants is selling us down the river.

WFH? Snap out of it

With the days getting warmer and the nights lighter, the lure of working from home is easy to understand.

More time spent with loved ones or in the garden, less on the ghastly commute.

But with Britain on the brink of an economic downturn, the country must pull together to get through the storms ahead.

With Covid behind us, we can no longer afford the luxury of absence from the office.

While European nations are returning to work with gusto, Britain’s white-collar workers are digging in their heels – not least our slothful civil servants.

Yet in most jobs, face-to-face working is essential to efficient performance. Indeed, home working has been truly abysmal for delivering vital public services.

And you don’t need to be a career adviser to see how office life is vital to build relationships and develop skills. Let’s not forget, too, the damage stayaway workers cause to our city centres, with shops, bars and restaurants reliant on their custom.

Unless we snap out of this self-indulgence and power up Britain again, the looming recession will become a catastrophe.

Risible revolutionary

When Margaret Thatcher came to power in the 1970s, Britain was a land of economic gloom, strikes, bad food and glam rock.

But through tough political choices she transformed the country into a self-confident powerhouse.

Yet she remains a hate figure for the dim, intolerant, virtue-signalling Left.

It’s not surprising, then, that someone chose to hurl an egg at her newly unveiled statue in Grantham.

In his head the culprit, Jeremy Webster, might think he’s Che Guevara. 

In reality, he’s a pathetic, embarrassing 59-year-old who works at Leicester University, British academia’s cradle of wokery.

Rather than debate ideas, he and his fellow tinpot revolutionaries simply resort to vandalism. 

One person who was distinctly unimpressed was his wife’s mother who branded him ‘childish’. 

And as we all know, mother (in-law) knows best. 

Jeremy Webster, 59, who works at Leicester University threw eggs at a statue of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on Sunday

 Voters could grudgingly accept being hammered with the highest taxes since the Second World War if it meant clearing huge NHS backlogs. 

What sticks in the craw is the eye-watering sums wasted on boosting the health service’s army of overpaid bureaucrats. 

Only in the right-on world of NHS management could box-ticking and diversity targets be more important than patients waiting in agony for treatment.

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