It's amazing how these sad souls so quickly forget the damage that same stupidity did to our pensions when dear Gordon snatched cash from pension companies.

Thank goodness someone in the Labour party still has just a glimmer of common sense left.
John Hutton the business secretary, has effectively ruled out a windfall tax against energy companies.

He says, quite rightly, that all that would happen is that the companies would pass on the loss in even greater charges to customers.

Hutton spells it out quite clearly – the days of cheap energy are over.

But it could have been so different. If the government hadn't listened to environmentalists quite so much we could now have had much cheaper nuclear power.

Instead, a fortune now has to be spent on new nuclear plants.

We had a two decades or more of cheap gas and oil from the North Sea.

The tax revenue from that should have been ring fenced to build the gas and oil storage facilities, wind farms, tidal and hydro-electric plants to help us when the gas and oil from the North Sea ran out, as they knew it would.

Now we are at the mercy of other countries in the supply of oil and gas, and some of those countries we have to do business with are not the best of friends with us.

Energy companies need the profits they make to plough back for gas and oil exploration. Very little goes on providing dividends to shareholders.

Mr Hutton also realises that if you snatch windfall taxes from energy companies fewer people will want to invest in the energy industry – at the very time when it needs the cash to help UK plc out of a serious energy mess.
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