Wednesday, 12 January 2011

More EUreferendum nonsense

Strange that EUreferendum is the only thing to get me cross enough to post. After, the fact that someone is wrong on the internet should not ever be a sufficient reason for wasting one's time in correcting them! Still, here goes.

The latest from the egregious one(s) is:

"Thus, we end up paying more for energy than virtually any other consumer in Europe (and the developed world). No one knows why, and even the experts disagree. Different sections of the media have different explanations, but all are quite happy to use "corporate greed" to hide the cost of the greenery."

Now, suffice it to say that this is reasonably easy to check, since the DoE or whatever it's called now do surveys on this very question (see http://www.decc.gov.uk/assets/decc/Statistics/publications/prices/1085-qepdec10.pdf), which include pages of international comparisons. Now, it's true that diesel is very expensive here, thanks to high taxes, and petrol too. But on electricity we are in the middle of the table and on gas, we are close to being the cheapest.

EUreferendum has a style all its own. It manages to make the most commonsense positions seem utterly repulsive simply by espousing them. It's therefore most delightful to catch them out (no doubt, if they ever rose to the bait, they would engage in one of their lengthy and tedious rebuttals), thereby disproving the general rule that one should never, ever, correct anything wrong on the internet.