MPs want to turn your lights off. A shame no one told you Last Tuesday something happened in the House of Commons so weird that it must be counted as one of the more terrifying episodes in the entire history of our Parliament. Towards the end of a seven-hour debate on its virtually incomprehensible, 200-page Energy Bill, the Government slipped in a new amendment proposing something so utterly mad that, if anyone present had understood its implications, it might have made front-page news. What MPs were being asked to endorse was that, within just six years, we should all be forced by law to make a mind-boggling cut in how much electricity we are allowed to use. The reason why no one seemed to grasp this was that the amendment was so opaquely dressed up that only an MP with some knowledge of the basics of electricity might have twigged the enormity of what was being proposed. By 2020, it said, Britain must reduce its electricity use by "103 terawatt hours," rising by 2030 to "154 terawatt hours." This could have been understood only by someone aware that we currently use each year some 378 "terawatt hours." So what was being proposed was that this must be cut down in six years by 27 per cent - more than a quarter - rising 10 years later to a cut of more than 40 per cent, or two fifths. In the course of his mind-numbing speech, Greg Barker, the minister proposing this, carefully avoided any explanation of what it was all about. Not one MP picked him up on it. At the end of a vacuous debate, during much of which the House was virtually empty, MPs dutifully poured in from all over Westminster to nod the Bill through by 396 votes to eight. It was clear that, apart from a vapid document it published last year called Electricity Demand Reduction, the Government hasn't the faintest practical idea how such a massive cut might be achieved without doing irreparable damage to our economy and our way of life. It was simply a measure of the inadequacy of those elected to rule us that the MPs could meekly agree to such an absurd proposition. But what it also brought home, more than ever, was the scale of the shambles the Government is making of our energy policy, skewed by its obsession that the world is in the grip of runaway global warming and that Britain alone must do something to halt it. In order to "decarbonise" our electricity supply by 2030, the Government wishes to build thousands more wind turbines, so heavily subsidised that this doubles, or trebles, the price of the electricity they unreliably produce. It babbles about "carbon-free" nuclear reactors, although companies are refusing to build them unless they are also allowed to sell their power at double the price. The Government is deliberately trying to drive out of business the CO2-emitting fossil-fuel power stations which still supply more than two thirds of our electricity, by charging them a "carbon tax" which, if they survive at all, will also eventually double the price of their electricity. Yet because the Government knows that the wind doesn't always blow and that we will soon be running out of proper power stations to make up the difference, it has now come up with this brilliant idea that it calls "Electricity Demand Reduction" (or "negawatts"). By this it somehow imagines that it will be able to impose by law a quite ludicrously crippling reduction in how much electricity we are all to be permitted to use. No other politicians in the world would for a moment contemplate such a spider's web of insanities. But that is what, last week, our Government solemnly proposed, and our MPs almost unanimously voted for, dressed up in such deceitful, jargon-packed language that not a single MP or journalist - led, of course, by those global warming-obsessed babies from the BBC - noticed what was going on. When, a few years back, I wrote a book called The Real Global Warming Disaster, this was very much the disaster I predicted that we seemed to be heading for. Last week's abysmal performance by our MPs simply brought it another giant step nearer. Not much of a saving, Mr Balls Much highlighted by the BBC and others last week was the centrepiece of what Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, called his "tough" plans to reduce our public-spending deficit: his promise to scrap the £200 winter-fuel allowance to higher tax-rate pensioners. This, he proudly claimed, would save £100 million a year. What was not explained - by him or the BBC - was that, since our borrowing is running at £120 billion a year, this saving would only cover seven hours of the year. That leaves a mere 8,753 hours in the year for which Mr Balls has to come up with another "tough" plan.