What can you actually do as leader of the opposition? There’s a lot of rhetoric from labor about the cost of living crisis. Can you actually do anything other than complain to the pm unless there’s some other way that Labour in the opposition can take action? Do something? Will they be little done to address the problems in the UK?
Keir Starmer MP: Oh, look, we can do things that we have done things. So if you take the question of the energy bills this winter, obviously, people were facing massive increases. We came out very early, as the opposition, said, you’ve got to freeze those bills, you’ve got to freeze them. The government said, ‘Oh, what a load of nonsense’ before they then adopted our plan to freeze the bill. So we forced that forward.
Now, obviously, the big divide now is if you freeze them who’s going to pay for that? And we are making the argument that it should be there should be a windfall tax on oil and gas companies who’ve made billions of pounds they didn’t expect to make less.
Truss says no, no, no, it should be the taxpayer who pays because I’m going to stick it on the never-never on borrowing. So there’s a fight to be had there….We are going to continue pushing, saying oil and gas companies should actually pay their fair share.
Labour wants to reverse the mini-budget, and obviously, you’re going to be highly critical. But how would you do that? How are you going to stabilize the markets and reverse and reverse that mini-budget?
Keir Starmer MP: Well, so what we do is we reverse this kamikaze budget, it was obviously wrong. It’s had a devastating effect on the market. We would then cancel the cut to corporation tax because we don’t think that’s the right thing to do.
We would introduce as I think you said in your introduction, a windfall tax on oil and gas companies in the North Sea. They’ve made huge profits they didn’t expect to make. And the government won’t touch that they themselves.
Actually, you may have seen that the oil companies are saying a gas company said look, we do actually think it’s fair that we pay a bit more. So we would reverse that stabilize the economy.
