People need to drop the sense of entitlement and cut back in response to energy crisis - Yorkshire Post Letters

If, as seems plausible, the sharp rise in energy and fuel prices is due to a reduction in available supplies, then the response of some politicians and others suggests a disregard for rationality and economics.

It may be that, under our two-party system, neither can hold office without the votes of those for whom the unpalatable is unacceptable.

These parties lack the courage for speaking truth to power: that is to say to their voters.

The system intentionally excludes those who might gain a few seats and a voice just from the support of voters who are prepared to face reality.

In times of shortage prices rise until demand is pulled into alignment with supply.

To frame the problem as one of how to enable everyone to go on consuming as before is to invite ever rising prices.

In a global shortage, one country might maintain its level of consumption. This would be by forcing even greater cuts on poorer countries. Is this how sanctimonious Keir Starmer, with his trumpeted anguish over poverty, wants us to proceed?

Rather than moving the tax burden away from energy and fuel, the Government should be heaping it on.

Assistance will be needed for those who cannot safely cut back further. But, unless the rhetoric of families going cold and/or hungry is completely hollow, our focus needs to shift from ‘relative poverty’ to absolute.

Help must be directed to meeting our objective of averting these evils, not simply increasing the spending power of the ‘poor’ to be exercised at their own sometimes dysfunctional discretion.

‘Windfall’ taxes would not provide the same incentive to conserve.

That is unless the suppliers simply pass the cost on to consumers, in which case the proposal is no different to my own.

We need to overcome the myth that things can only get better, even for the already comfortably off, and that the status quo is a bare minimum.

There is a sense of entitlement and a feeling that cutting back in response to price is beneath one’s dignity and an affront to one’s status.

One way in which the marginal cost of consumption could be increased, without adding a penny to the total bill for customers, would be to ban standing charges and switch that cost onto the unit price.