Having read Polly Toynbee’s spiteful article attacking the Lib Dems and Tories for opposing Home Information Packs, I took no small amount of pleasure to find Ruth Kelly capitulating and putting the scheme back.
What annoyed me most about Toynbee’s article was that it stuck religiously to the rote of “something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done”. In short, if you oppose HIPs, you oppose tackling climate change. The truth is though, while the energy reports are a step in the right direction, they will only scratch the surface in terms of promoting the energy efficiency of homes.
Unreported by Polly, Chris Huhne and Andrew Stunell have published their own details proposals for what to do about greening the existing housing stock (pdf). If she thinks these are terrible plans, she should say so. Instead she has simply attacked them for failing to back the government’s woefully inadequate proposals. Whatever you might have thought about her in the past, she used to be an independent thinker: now she’s become a polemical government speak-your-weight machine. It’s sad.
Polly Toynbee is best ignored. I have been moved to blog abut her myself, but her mistakes are so numerous that it hardly seems worth the bother.