It's not as though the country is short of money

Another Conservative politician who was all but destroyed but concerted Labour/BBC attacks on him whilst he was a minister in the last Conservative government was Peter Lilley. The Labour/BBC axis added him to the list of John Redwood, Michael Portillo and others who they hoped they had destroyed forever, just as Sarah Palin was attacked without mercy and often without truth in the recent Presidential election.

However Peter Lilley has not gone away and has come up with a terrifying report on the amount that fighting "climate change" is going to cost the UK.

"...cost up to £200bn; that's £10,000 from every family in the country.

I'm not talking about rescuing the banks. That involved loans which we should eventually get back. This is real money in taxes and lost incomes - money you will never see again."

Read the whole report that has been given hardly any publicity by the BBC on their website here.

As John Redwood says:

"Neither Parliament nor most of the media bothered to discuss the cost of one of the most immense projects ever adopted in this country. Indeed, Parliament wafted it through without even discussing its cost and with only five votes against.

In my experience, our biggest mistakes are made when Parliament and the media are virtually unanimous and MPs switch off their critical faculties in a spasm of moral self-congratulation. That is what happened with this Bill.

We all want to save the planet from overheating, just as we all want to save the financial system from meltdown. We accept that both rescues may cost us a lot.

But a healthy democracy should at least debate the cost, compare it with the likely benefits (or costs of doing nothing) and consider whether we can achieve the same ends at less cost.

Had MPs or commentators bothered to read the government's own estimates of the potential costs and benefits of the Climate Change Bill - the Impact Assessment - they would have found some extraordinary things.

Admittedly, on this occasion government failed to publish copies of the assessment in the normal way so it took a little effort to obtain. Apparently, I was the only MP to obtain a copy.

The contents of the Impact Assessment are astounding. Whereas it puts the Bill's potential cost as up to £205bn, it says the maximum benefits of this massive expenditure is £110bn.

I am all in favour of taking out an insurance policy, as the government describes it, against the threat of global warming.

But would you insure your home with a company if they charged premiums which could be double the value of your house? There must be a better insurance policy than this.

Moreover, the government admits that their estimate of the "maximum" cost is far from being the real maximum since it omits three huge items.

First, the Impact Assessment admits that it is "unable to capture transition costs which could be 1.3% to 2% of GDP in 2020".

Second, they make the fantastically optimistic assumption that all businesses will know and instantly adopt the most cost efficient technologies to achieve carbon savings.

Third, the assessment "cannot capture trade and competitiveness impacts"; in particular, the "relatively high risks of the transfer of productive capital to countries without carbon policies".

In other words, if we pursue the policies in the Climate Change Bill unilaterally, without others doing the same, we could end up driving UK business abroad without reducing carbon emissions because they will still be spewing forth carbon.

Yet this bill legally binds future British governments unilaterally to spend billions of pounds on trying to prevent climate change even if other countries do not follow our lead.

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The bill originally bound governments by law to meet targets for reducing carbon emissions by 26% by 2020 and 60% by 2050.

The new climate minister, Ed Miliband, amended it to raise the final target by a third to 80% - thereby increasing the likely cost by at least a third, although no-one deigned to mention this. He has refused to reveal the extra cost until after the bill becomes law.

We are lied to and ripped off by this Labour government on an almost daily basis and nothing seems to be able to be done about it. The people are getting angry Mr Brown, the people are getting very angry.