Our business-friendly government, embarrassed by rocketing energy prices, asks the energy profiteers to give back some of their obscene profits to help their poorer customers. The profiteers tell the government to get stuffed, and rightly so. The facilitators of an uncontrolled market economy deserve the contempt of their beneficiaries and the wrath of their victims.
So poor old Gordon Brown tries another tack; penalising the robber barons is short-termism, he avers. He, sound man, advocates long term solutions. So that means we're all going to have more of those long-life bloody light bulbs.
Here I must quote the Baron Keynes, "In the long term we are all dead." (Under current conditions, probably of hypothermia.)
Our business-friendly government has been trying, for some time now, to "nudge" (buzz word) the energy profiteers into giving up their token racket, by which they overcharge the poorest of the poor for their gas and electricity. The profiteers respond with a "One day, maybe", and carry on with the extortion. They love to rub the government's nose in it.
Meanwhile the TV news broadcasters ask the the robber barons to send a spokesperson to defend their profiteering. The profiteers tell the newscasters to get stuffed. They do, however, send along a handout which a presenter duly reads out. Nobody would dream of telling these rogues "If you can't face questioning, we're not delivering your bullshit to the people who pay our wages." Now that would take backbone.

Our business-friendly government can't do anything to help the poorest sector of the population, but it can and will find money to help house owners (for which read mortgage owners) in negative equity. For decades now successive governments have helped the middle-classes to accrue wealth by means of small scale property speculation. Protective practices have ensured that property was a risk-free investment. Now external factors beyond government control have intervened in the UK property market. Values, it seems, can decrease as well as increase. What a shock to the denizens of that repository of all that is good, MIDDLE ENGLAND. Someone's going to pay for this. Oh yes, that'll be me and my kind.