Update 20.00
I owe the Ed Miliband and the Labour Party an apology with reservations. They did publish an “energy green paper” on Friday. The reservations are
- It was published at http://www.yourbritain.org.uk/agenda-2015/policy-review/policy-review/energy-green-paper. (Alexa, has no country data for the site)
- My mistake was to use the key words “Labour Energy Green Paper” in my bing search. There is (7pm) no reference to this in the first 50 hits, but there are references to the Labour Party website. Even the Chelmsford Weekly News article (No Alexa country data for this site) makes 20.
- The Labour Party Website (UK Alexa rank 9,080) still does not reference the document.
- The website referred to on the video (http://www.labour.org.uk/freezethatbill) is inaccurate. It should read http://www.labour.org.uk/freeze-that-bill. Even here you will not find a link to the energy green paper.
My mistake, in accusing Ed Miliband of not publishing the paper when he had, was due to a misconception. I assumed that Labour Party spin doctors would be super-efficient, and so the failure to publish would be due to simple, but embarrassing, clerical errors. Having now read the paper, it would seem to go a bit deeper than that.
Labour’s claim to have published a green paper on energy is untrue. There is no link on the internet to any document, whether freely available, or to purchase.
BishopHill reported on Friday 29th November that Labour Party leader Ed Miliband had launched a “Green paper on energy”, proposing a freeze in energy price is Labour wins power in 2015. At the BBC there is a video of Ed Miliband saying
…and what Britain needs is Labour’s strong and credible plan, that we are publishing today, to freeze energy prices until 2017 and reform a broken energy market so it properly works for business and families.
As I always like to read the original source material, I went to look for it.
Tried at http://www.labour.org.uk/news, which announces:-
The Energy Green Paper sets out the steps a One Nation Labour government will take while we reset the market during the 20 month price freeze to ensure energy is affordable and available…
But no link on the site to a pdf, neither a link to a shop where I might procure a paper copy of the green paper.
It gets worse. In the home page, the lower part for the last couple of days has this:-
It says
Read Ed Miliband’s energy plan
The link is to http://action.labour.org.uk/page/s/energy-calculator/.
No details of the plan. No details of the links to a plan. But there is a link to a video of 1.26 minutes long.
At 1.22 there is a link to “labour.org.uk/freezethatbill”.
This takes me straight back to http://action.labour.org.uk/page/s/energy-calculator. The details do not exist.
Further, there is no link at the BBC, The Mirror, The Guardian, at Sky News, nor a number of other websites that have run the story.
The Labour Spin Doctors have been so concerned to get out the media message, they forgot the substance.
Kevin Marshall
ManicBeancounter 