Answer Time

Comment moderation, and so on, later today.

While we all prepare for the best Question Time in months, with Peter Hitchens and Owen Jones arguing for British state ownership of Britain's utilities, of Britain's railways and of the Royal Mail, while Liz Truss and Tim Farron argue instead for those assets to be in Chinese state ownership, like a half-stake in Grangemouth.

But what, then, will say the fifth panellist, Caroline Flint, Shadow Secretary of State for Energy? And is she proud of her own Blairite faction for having hounded Unite over Falkirk this summer, resulting in the closure of a vital part of the infrastructure of Scotland, Northern Ireland and the North of England?

If Grangemouth served the South East, then it would already have been nationalised by this hour. That would cost far less than the bribing of the Chinese to build Hinkley so that at some future time they could also close that. Although it is splendid that this Government has reverted to its predecessor's trade union policy in favour of nuclear power.

But if neoliberalism is so wonderful, then why have we gone cap in hand to China in order to develop our nuclear energy supply? And if it is impossible to fix British energy prices for 20 months in order to benefit British households, then how is it possible to set British energy prices for 35 years in order to benefit the French and Chinese States?

Nationalising Grangemouth would cost vastly less than the Government has cost the taxpayer by undervaluing the Royal Mail, which has been bought up by hedge funds and by the pension funds of foreign states, as well as by George Osborne's best man, who has made a killing. That undervaluation has lost us four times as much as Gordon Brown's sale of gold reserves did.

Speaking of hedge funds, the problem with the Co-op Bank was that it was not a co-op. It was merely owned by a co-op. Its fate is an argument, not against the mutualisation of the financial services sector, but in favour of that mutualisation.

60 per cent of green taxes have been imposed since this Government came to office, and the Conservatives, under their present Leader, voted for all of the others even before that. Last week's Mail on Sunday, that well-known ware of the Trotskyist street vendors, found that 75 per cent of people did not believe that those taxes had anything to do with rising energy bills. Such bills went down, and that quite considerably, while Ed Miliband was Energy Secretary.

All in all, it is no wonder that points such as that this Government is all for State ownership of key British infrastructure so long as the State in question is not the British State, and that taking on the energy cartel is the Tory battle against the nabobs and the Whig magnates of the present age, have been made in recent days by such figures as Peter Oborne, Tim Montgomerie, Lord Saatchi and Sir John Major. Ed Miliband is reversing not only Blair's Year Zero, but also Thatcher's.