Last Sunday Sweden’s biggest national daily Dagens Nyheter ran a front page story headlined Energy Expert Says Boycott Electricity Giants. Roger Fredriksson is the expert and he has set up a Switch website where you swap between a few big purveyors of monopoly services…who fix prices and control the market…and a few dozen minnows in their wake. No great difference in price…three times as high today as six years ago…but fights over the small print. Endowment Mortgages spring to mind. The corporate and regulatory suits love switch websites. Evidence of competition they intone. Evidence of the gullibility of the public and the arrogance of the elites if you ask me.

In the Swedish Media the electricity industry…Vattenfall, Eon and Fortum…has been wringing its hands in its best Uriah Heep manner bemoaning the failure of snow to fall last winter. No snow. No mountain streams. No turning turbines. Sounds plausible? Perhaps. Tragic? Of course. Sweden has been forced to import expensive oil from the unstable Middle East and go cap in hand to the Carbon Trading Floor in Brussels for Emission Permits. Groan!

Stuff and nonsense says Woger. The cost of electricity has hardly changed in six years. But Government Taxes and Energy Company Profits have skyrocketed…and here is a diagram to prove it. Whoops. It proved nothing of the sort. It showed that Value Added Tax on electricity has gone up threefold since 1999 and was now over 50%. Hmm!

So about a fifth of the money Swedes pay for electricity is for the cost of it and the rest is taxes. Is this to make Nuclear Power viable? Fat chance…without lying…currently the preferred option. Or is this what happens when Green Parties join Government Coalitions and start smacking the naughty energy consumers? Hmm! Hmm!

Yet surely this cannot be right? You are right. It can’t. And it isn’t. On Tuesday Dagens Nyheter slipped in a correction on an inside page. VAT and Price had been inadvertently reversed in the diagram. Hmm! Hmm! Hmm!...and Hmmm!

Here is a different approach…in a two-policy package. Government sets the price of electricity to Homeowners…and keeps it constant for a long time…in purchasing power terms like rents in Stockholm…use a basket of commodities. Two kilowatt-hours for one Swedish Krona looks about right. And why not do a Silvio Gesell and sell electricity cheaper the less that is taken from the National Grid...the arguments for Water Pricing apply to electricity too.

For the second part of the package Government sets the price of energy based on cost of production…and the public desirability of the technology. The Danes are already going down this road. Nothing for nuclear power…even a Minus Price called a Tax…to set up a Norwegian-style Fund for Future Generations. Nothing for biofuels which are slaughtering millions of people all over the Third World as Iowa sells its corn to cars. It is doubtful whether this nonsense is energy-positive anyway when you count the energy costs of harvesting. Good way to make gin though.

And for those lovers of Nuclear Energy…ay there be power in them their neutrons…the mantra is: Nuclear Fission Bad. Nuclear Fusion Good. You can use the one in the sky 93 million miles away but for more give each boy a Gyroscope and a Pendulum for his seventh birthday with a big prize for anyone who gets energy from Cold Fusion.

If Real People paint their roof black and rig up a few hundreds metres of copper piping then encourage them. And if you pay Judicial Persons watch them like a hawk…and don’t trust a word they say. While you’re about it put a few company directors before Peace Crime Tribunals in Düsseldorf and Essen…pour décourager les autres.

Mikhail Gorbachev is the cleverest man alive…this from his address at Harvard University on 11/11-2002…for me not the best of times. ‘I would like to quote someone, a person whom you may have heard of, Chou En-lai, the former Prime Minister of China. He was talking to a delegation from France and the delegation people asked him what he thought about the impact of the French Revolution on the world and also on China. And Chou En-lai I think responded very well. And he didn't take too much time to answer. He said, "You know, I think it's too early to tell.’