Douglas Carswell, fresh from his defection from the Conservatives to UKIP, recently won time to debate energy costs in Parliament yesterday. The transcript is here. It's not terribly exciting, but there was one rather delicious moment where the minister, Matthew Hancock felt obliged to respond to Carwell's taunts about Conservative policy on energy, namely that it was a "prices and incomes" policy:
...a prices and incomes policy for energy in 2015 will no more work than a prices and incomes policy has worked for anything in the past. Prices and incomes policies do not work.
As Hancock put it
By switching from a regime in which...subsidy is given out to whatever renewable technology was brought forward to a regime in which a controlled pot of subsidy is auctioned to ensure that we get the best possible value for money, we have made a change towards a market-oriented system.
So it's still a prices and income policy, but a different one.