On page 2 of this morning's Times there appears to be a story straight from the Treasury bemoaning MPs for wasting taxpayers money on asking questions. As people will recall from this site, and a recent press release from the Conservative Party, the Government, and especially the Treasury, likes to avoid answering questions wherever possible.
Occasionally they are justified due to the granularity of detail being requested, however often they are not, as the question should be able to be answered quite quickly if they were to keep the sort of auditing that businesses are expected to maintain.
The report quotes a "Treasury source" (presumably Ed Balls) moaning about questions from MPs regarding the use of energy efficient light bulbs in the Treasury. The source asks whether MPs posing the questions are "really expecting taxpayers’ money to be spent counting all the light bulbs?” Now, standing alone one might think this is a valid point, but there is actually a much wider issue at play.
Firstly, as I posted back in November, the Government is currently lobbying the EU to regulate non-energy efficient light bulbs out of the marketplace on environmental grounds. It is therefore a valid question to ask how many light bulbs are actually energy efficient in Government offices. The phrase "do as I say, not as I do" springs to mind.
Additionally, citing this question in isolation is disingenuous. As I also posted about in the same month, questions relating to light bulbs were posed to pretty much every department, and they were done so at the time that the Government was trying to bolster its claims about being tree hugging greenies. If the Government is serious about it's environmental credentials then knowing whether it acts, as well as talks, is, frankly, quite important.
Of course the most ironic thing about this Treasury quote - which was presumably sanctioned by Brown - is that they chose their record on energy efficiency as the example. Surely Gordon - who wants us to believe that he's the real "Mr Green" - would want to boast about energy efficiency in his department, not complain about being questioned on it?
7 comments:
You bea tme to it. I read the article and thought how typical of the Government to be against freedom of speech legislation.
After all, they brought it in and now don't like how it works at all; this seems to remind me of their opinion on the majority of the legislation they have brought forward in the last 10 years!
What's the betting there's already a directive being hatched requiring everybody else in the country to count light-bulbs withn severe penalties for non-compliance?
Balls is talking... well.... balls. No one has to go and physically count the light bulbs in every office. Surely all they have to do is phone down to the stores and ask: "How many energy efficient light bulbs have you issued in the last twelve months? And what's the guaranteed life span?"
With those two pieces of information one should be able to calculate how many energy efficient light bulbs are installed in about 2 minutes.
Of course that's thinking like an engineer, not some moron of a politician.
Now I've got an arsehole of a gov'nor asking me to turn out a plan based on pie in the sky thinking, so I'm off.
Bye.
I suspect most MPs have at least two residences. I wonder how that increases their carbon footprint. But then they will say they need it, plus need to travel for their roles.
Don't we all!
In a world of scarce resources I wonder if any calculation has been done on how much a human being in the Western world will add with regards C02 emissions? Perhaps the next steps will be to limit the number of kids people have.
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If questions about low energy lightbulbs are disapproved of I guess questions about why we are wasting money fighting wars we can't win and could not gain anything from winning anyway are right out of order.
Of course, normal light bulbs are "combined light and heat" units so it only makes sense to replace them during the summer when the extra heat they create is (hopefully) a problem.
Brown (noun) A colour that varies between red and yellow and ranges from light and dark
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