In Fleet Street circles, for years it was affectionately dubbed as the silly season. That period from early July to September when everyone, including the news hounds, were on their hols and big news stories were decidedly thin on the ground. Instead, they would simply make some up, or elevate a truly ludicrous tale to such levels that it would become an indelible part of popular folk law. Think Freddie Starr ate my hamster! Back in the early ‘90s we especially recall a particularly ridiculous headline grabber involving a gang of builders who were banged to rights by the local council for their early morning on site renditions of a popular song from the sixties: “Come, Mr Tallyman, tally me banana, daylight come, and I want to go home”. It ran and ran for weeks – to much amusement.
Fast forward to the summer of 2022 and it’s all too apparent that the silly season is still very much alive and well… the only difference being that today the stories don’t need any artificial embellishments from our media chums. It would appear that fact really is stranger than fiction, from the toppling of – in election terms at least – one of the most successful Conservative leaders ever and the painfully drawn out and undignified process of replacing him, to train strikes without commuters, because they are all still working from home, and, of course, the real icing on a rapidly melting cake, the great British obsession with the weather. It’s been open season here in the silly isles!
Of course, the heatwave of – surprise, surprise – mid-July, which saw record temperatures for all of two days in some but certainly not all of the UK, was quite literally a heaven-sent opportunity for those habitual harbourers of doom and gloom who couldn’t wait to impart apocalyptic type tales of death and destruction. “Thousands will die” screamed one of many scaremongering headlines, and, of course, there were no shortages of helpful Covid-inspired public information messages to “stay cool” and “keep a bottle of water handy”. If they weren’t already, our European cousins must be laughing on the other side of their evenly bronzed faces at the total over-reaction of daily situations which they face and apparently cope with quite comfortably each and every summer.
Amongst all this mayhem, there was another story, hidden away, which might just take the biscuit in highlighting one of the silliest decisions ever made during this summer or any other. Facing a cost-of-living crisis, with energy bills across the board soaring, Whitehall bureaucrats have devised a cunning new plan. Called the Market Mechanism, this new scheme will penalise British boiler manufacturers if they do not fit heat pumps, even though the Government’s advisers acknowledge that this will increase heating bills by an average of 10 per cent.
Mike Foster CEO of the Energy Utilities Alliance (EUA) summed up an increasingly incredulous mood within the industry: “I can’t recall a more ridiculous policy than the so-called market mechanism. We have always said this smacks of Soviet-style planning, with bureaucrats telling industry what they must sell, regardless of what the consumer might want, or afford, and with huge financial penalties facing already hard-pressed British businesses if they disobey Whitehall.” In fact, one leading UK boiler manufacturer told us that it would probably be in their interests to give the heat pumps away rather than face a potential £5,000 fine for selling what, these days, are highly engineered and extremely efficient boilers.
We understand similar “mechanisms” are also likely to impact the motoring industry with stinging penalties imposed for not hitting electric vehicle targets and you can bet that other sectors of industry will similarly come under an unwelcome spotlight in the coming months. There can be no question that such a policy sets a very dangerous and somewhat sinister appendage to the green agenda. What next? suppliers of traditional housebuilding materials being penalised in favour of perceived more energy conscious off site fabricators? The mind boggles, and it is clearly not the heat getting to us.
Not unsurprisingly, the UK heating industry has submitted alternative options to the Government and the EUA is far from alone in asking those in power to decide whose side they are on, the consumer and the British manufacturer or the energy suppliers and foreign importers?
Back in more innocent times, those ultimate masters of silliness, the Monty Python team knew how to end a sketch that had simply gone too far by bringing on a random character to impart the immortal words: “stop this, it’s getting silly now.” We could certainly all do with a similar dose of reality right now.
