Another day, another set of hysterical headlines about energy company profits.

This time Centrica plc, the £30bn owner of British Gas, has achieved record yet relatively unremarkable profits of £3.3bn – triple its results in 2021, but only around 10% of equivalent results for British fossil fuel majors.

Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham describes this as ‘obscene’ and ‘rampaging energy profiteering’. Her words are echoed by Mel Evans of Greenpeace, who along with others is calling for a ‘proper windfall tax’. Some have also raised the recent story about a British Gas contractor’s unethical debt collection practices as evidence of Centrica’s malevolence and greed.

Nor is this confined to the usual leftwing talking heads. Even people with broadly free market instincts are using terms like ‘price gouge’ to describe profits from market prices.

This is all too typical of an era in which successive Conservative governments adopt Labour policies like price controls and windfall taxes in panicked reaction to the bad publicity. None of this is new, but it does show how badly the free market side of the debate is losing, and has been for 25 years – and that is both puzzling and dangerous if we want to keep the lights on.