Families need to spend £1,165 a year to adequately heat their homes, but people in the lowest 10 per cent of incomes are spending only £723, leaving homes cold and potentially damaging children’s health.

This “fuel gap” of £450 has more than doubled from £200 in 2004, Barnardo’s said.

Now I’m not doubting their numbers: happy enough with that. It’s just the way that they’re entirely missing the entire thrust of government policy.

You know, this climate change thing? We should all use less energy? To which aim governments over the past decade have deliberately been making energy more expensive? You know, to cut our use of it and thus delay the day, perhaps eliminate the day, that Flipper is boiled in the meltwater of the last Arctic ice floe?

Governments that have deliberately made energy more expensive by making every energy bill in the country pay for solar power at 4 times the normal rate, wind power at twice and then stuck extra charges on top?

That’s why energy is getting more expensive: because those who rule over us have decided to deliberately make it more expensive.

Now, as it happens, I agree with the need to do something. But I’ve always argued that instead of this mishmash of stupidities that we currently have we should just whack a carbon tax on everything. According to economic theory (yeah, I know, economists, Pah!) the end result would be the same. However, in the interim there would be tax revenue which the government could spend on, umm, perhaps subsidising the fuel bills of those too poor to pay the higher prices?

Instead we’ve a system where the subsidy goes to Cameron’s father in law (£1,000 a day in rent on his windmills they say).

So, for Barnardo’s, if you’re worried about fuel poverty you’ve got to keep two things in mind. Firstly, that this is deliberately engineered in the name of protecting Gaia. And secondly that you should be campaigning against the way that we do this in order to reduce those effects of fuel poverty.

But then that would require you to actually know anything about what you’re spouting off about. Which as yet another organisation captured by preening hippies just isn’t one of those things you’re going to be able to do, is it?