High speed and other gas
Sir: Some of Mr Nicholas Daven- port's views about nationalised in- dustries are so childishly inane that he ought to keep them to him- self.
As any marketing man would tell him, the High Speed Gas advertis- ing, far from being fatuous or wasteful, has been extraordinarily effective. It wiped the smile off the face of 'Mrs 1970', a more ex- pensive and infinitely less success- ful oil company effort, by stealing the huge middle income group cen- tral heating market away from oil in the early and middle 'sixties. It also collared a large part of the rest of the domestic heating market from electricity, which is far more capital-intensive than gas and which, in the days before the great gas boom brought about by High Speed Gas, was being used very un- economically for space heating in peak periods. One would have expected Mr Davenport to appreciate the bene- fits that competition between the fuel industries has brought to the consume?. But not a bit of it. Gas and electricity should not compete at all and what is more the gas industry should be denied direct access to the source of what has now become its only raw material —natural gas from the North Sea. This, Mr Davenport says, should be exploited solely by the oil in- dustry. Why on earth? Aren't 'the oil companies powerful enough already? Is it not a good rather than a bad thing that the national- ised gas industry should have been outstandingly successful in the North Sea gas search? Admittedly it is involved in this with Ameri- can oil company partners, but this was because the British oil com- panies refused to associate with it on the grounds that it was publicly owned. Has Mr Davenport for- gotten the marathon battle which the Gas Council fought to keep the beach price of North Sea gas down to a reasonable level? Partly as a result of oil company pressure the coal industry has been run down too fast. There is now a growing shortage of coal and every pros- pect of steeply rising oil prices. Hardly the time, one would have thought, for the usually more thoughtful Mr Davenport to rub his hands with crude glee at the thought of publicly-owned business being 'lined up for the Tory high jump'.
V. G. Harrison Holliswood Cottage, Wrecclesham, Farnham, Surrey
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