Re: Pass those savings one British Gas
"Because if they had transparent charging you would be able to tell who was the cheapest and everyone would switch to whoever had the cheapest Tariff. "
Obviously you've never heard of the concept of price comparison web sites? A novel innovation that means you don't have to do much work, and they'll give you every tariff in the land, in order of price. Not too hard for you, was that?
"Basically, the entire concept of privatised electricity/gas and "competition" is based around using confusing Tariffs to trick customers into not leave after you edge the prices up."
As it's piss easy to change suppliers, just shop round once a year, and if you're notified of an impending price rise. Are you twerp enough to just take your insurer's annual price hike? I doubt it, so why any big deal of energy prices? And the prices in Tesco change all the time, do you bleat pathetically about that too?
Privatisation reduced prices significantly for a decade or so - there's a few reasons they've being going up over the past few years, partly world markets, but also Gordon Brown's economic incompetence that has caused sterling to slide, making any globally traded commodity more expensive, and DECC's idiot "green" and social policies that are currently adding about £150 a year to your bill. So the whole "privatisation is wrong" hand wringing ignores the expense, inefficiency and incompetence of state suppliers (maybe you're too young to remember how crap they were under state ownership, but I'm not).