Why We Aren’t Evil – in one page

The energy market is a massively complicated affair. Even at the level at which ordinary consumers interact with it, it can be very hard to understand.

That applies ten-fold when energy gets political, as now.

When profits suddenly look high (billions, you say!) the story will leak from the biz pages to the news bit.

The Evening Standard today calculates that BP made profit of £306 a second, a number it whacked on the front page.

And when there’s calls for windfall taxes on those companies, the split is typically that business editors are against it and consumer editors are for it.

BP, Shell and the rest seem happy with that. They get a kicking, but reassure themselves that the real experts are on their side.

This approach assumes that the people writing the stories or comments are going to highly knowledgeable. That isn’t always true. Sometimes idiots like me have to get involved.

As news resources get ever more stretched, there will be more and more us obliged to dip into topics with which we couldn’t possibly claim certainty.

Which I think means big companies should be nimbler, and start right at the beginning.

If you want to know, for example, just how much the big-company-under-fire pays in tax or in dividends, the quickest way is to ask AJ Bell.

Sometimes you have to plead with big companies to offer the most basic defence of what they do and why.

Be better if they had a one-page Why We Aren’t Evil briefing note ready to go, but they seldom seem to.