Tag Archives: bills

Tory energy minister blames Labour for his own government’s failings

Why do Tories insist on trying to mislead us on every slightest blunder they make, when we can find the facts easily anyway?

Here’s Graham Stuart, Tory Energy Minister, blaming the last Labour government – which ended in 2010 – for his own government’s lack of exertion in bringing energy bills down with insulation and heat pumps, and investment in renewables:

And what are the facts?

I think it’s going a bit far to say that the Tories’ failure on this has kept energy bills high, though, when the globalised energy giants like Shell and BP are charging us whatever they like because they get most of their cash abroad.

I mean, who owns the wind farms, apart from the King?

Source: UK energy minister blames Labour for soaring energy bills | Energy bills | The Guardian

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No more help for households, says Hunt, despite energy price cap rise in April

Grinning Hunt: the Chancellor won’t help families cope with energy price increases in April – not because he can’t, but because he doesn’t want to.

Jeremy Hunt, Chancellor of the Exchequer and well-known misprint, has said he won’t provide any more help for households to pay for their energy bills.

This means the Tory government’s Energy Bills Support Scheme will end in March, just before the cap on our energy bills rises to an expected average of £3,000.

So we’re all facing a real-terms rise of £900 on our energy bills and Hunt will do nothing about it.

He has said,

This is not true.

According to Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis, when the announcement that the price guarantee would rise by 20 per cent was made in Hunt’s Autumn Statement, energy prices were significantly higher than they are now.

The current expectation is that in July, energy regulator Ofgem’s price cap (rather than the government’s price guarantee) will drop below both the £3,000 set to come in April and the £2,500 limit in force now, so we will all pay less.

This means the government is likely to save around £10 billion on what it was expecting to spend on the price guarantee at the time of the Autumn Statement.

That’s a pretty significant change, if you ask me!

Mr Lewis has written to the Chancellor, informing him of these expectations and calling on him to keep the price guarantee at its current level until July – a measure that will add only £1.5 billion to the current cost (leaving £8.5 billion in the kitty).

He has said this is better than inflicting poverty – and its devastating effects – on the people of the UK.

You can see him saying it here:

So it seems clear that Hunt has lied; he does have the headroom to help people with a new initiative, the situation has changed significantly and he can give more help to families.

He just doesn’t want to.

Remember this: the Conservative Chancellor would rather inflict poverty on you than do his job, which is to protect you from financial troubles that are no fault of your own.

Source: Jeremy Hunt says no more help for households despite energy bills increase in April

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How has Shell made £32bn profit from inflated energy prices?

I’m confused.

According to this BBC article, Shell should be paying 75 per cent of its UK profits to the government in taxes.

In a year when the firm has announced record profits (due to inflated energy prices caused by the Russia-Ukraine war) of £32 billion, that comes to £1.2 billion.

It was supposed to pay a 35 per cent Windfall Tax on its “extraordinary” earnings. That would have come to £560 million – but in fact it only paid $134 million (almost £109 million).

There’s an additional 30 per cent in Corporation Tax, which should bring in £480 million, and a supplementary 10 per cent rate that should bring in £80 million. I notice the BBC piece is silent about whether that happened.

And gas and oil firms like Shell are allowed to reduce the amount of tax they pay by the cost of decommissioning projects like North Sea oil platforms and investments in other UK projects.

Meanwhile, the Tory government’s Energy Bills Support Scheme is costing the public £15 billion. The windfall tax was supposed to help fund it – but how many firms pay into it, and how much are they paying, if they are allowed to claw back so many millions?

The government hopes to make £14 billion per year – which is not enough to cover its costs.

And underlying all of this is the elephant in the room: how are these firms being allowed to make such huge profits in the first place?

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Is this the sinister truth behind Liz Truss’s energy price cap plan? [VIDEOS]

I’ll cut to the core: Liz Truss’s energy price cap plan preserves commercial profits at the expense of the public.

She’s putting you in debt so the shareholders of firms like Shell can profit.

That’s the gist of this clip:

But is this what follows the reason?

So, Truss worked for Shell and has received a donation from a wife of a BP executive, and now she is giving money to them and charging us in order to do it.

And did you notice the claim in the top video that Truss is now in thrall to the European Research Group MPs? Watch this:

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Tories in trouble as voters identify issues they’re ignoring as reasons to vote them out

Sunak and Truss: whoever wins the race to become prime minister will not be smiling when they have to deal with the issues that might force their government out of office – and they realise they have no answers.

Oh dear, oh dear: the Conservative Party is facing electoral collapse after people who voted Tory in 2019 identified the issues the next prime minister should tackle – and they’re mostly issues that party wants to ignore.

According to a Daily Express article, these include:

Inflation
The cost of living/energy bills
Delays in treatment by the National Health Service

Neither Liz Truss nor Rishi Sunak have shown much interest in any of these – having to be dragged into discussing the topics.

The only issue discussed by the voters the newspaper polled, in which the Conservatives have shown any interest, is immigration – a fake issue created by the Tory government as part of its ongoing “divide and rule” policy of presenting us all with an enemy to hate.

Sadly, they seem to have fooled a large number of people with it.

Whoever takes up the – some would say poisoned – chalice of the premiership in September, they will have to address these problems as a matter of urgency, or face the prospect of losing all the Parliamentary seats Boris Johnson won in 2019. That is a career-ending prospect.

Source: Furious Tory voters reveal key issues as party risks losing next general election

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Tory minister says no to freezing energy bills – but will ‘targeted packages’ work?

James Heappey: he doesn’t want to freeze energy bills, and looks delighted to be threatening you with poverty.

This is real Tory dedication to profit over people: they don’t want to freeze rocketing energy bills, even when an energy firm asks them to.

Scottish Power boss Keith Anderson called on Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng to consider the plan, and has also submitted it to Scottish First Secretary Nicola Sturgeon.

But Armed Forces Minister James Heappey has already said Kwarteng isn’t seriously considering the proposal, which is expected to cost £100 billion.

It seems he’s upset about paying such an “eye-watering” sum to keep us all out of destitution.

Instead, he supports a vague idea put forward by both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, to provide “targeted” help to those who need it most.

Who’s willing to bet that this means rich people get the lion’s share of the cash?

Remember the “targeted” help Sunak announced in May? He promised £400 to every home.

It was only after we read the small print that we realised people who own several homes would receive the £400 several times.

So the richest people got to benefit more, while the poorest were put at risk of mental illness, worrying about how to make ends meet.

Tory doubletalk – screwing you over since 2010.

Source: Not right to freeze energy bills despite ‘really expensive winter’ to come, minister says

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Nobody needs a plan to discredit Rishi Sunak – they only have to quote his record

Campaign to discredit: is Kwasi Kwarteng trying to destroy Rishi Sunak? Or does the Chancellor deserve all the criticism he receives after raising our taxes but (allegedly) avoiding paying his own while his wife did the same?

Rishi Sunak is trying to curry sympathy from the public by pretending that somebody has launched a campaign to discredit him by linking him with the way his wife avoids paying UK tax.

He is – as in so many of his political choices – completely wrong.

Nobody needs to use his wife to discredit Sunak – they only need to look at his own decisions:

He vetoed a plan to save the poorest families from soaring energy bills, according to a government leak.

Three options were put forward: increasing the £200 loan payment for all households (to be paid in the autumn) to “£500 or more”, either for all households or for the poorest; delaying repayment of the £200, which the Treasury is saying must be repaid at the rate of £40 a year over the following five years; or exempting the poorest homes from the need to repay at all, turning the loan into a grant.

Sunak apparently refused to consider any of these options, which are said to have come from Kwasi Kwarteng’s Business, Innovation and Skills Department. If he really does think fellow members of the government are briefing the press against him, then Kwarteng seems a likely candidate for suspicion.

2. He blocked plans to reduce millions of energy bills by making homes more energy efficient, according to another government leak.

It seems both Downing Street and Kwarteng’s team were hoping for an expansion of the Energy Company Obligation (Eco) scheme to be included in this week’s energy security strategy, with £200 million extra per year meaning the scheme could be expanded beyond only those receiving benefits to thousands more people.

Sunak apparently rejected the ideas because he is sticking to pledges he made in autumn 2021 – even though inflation means his tax take is around two-and-a-half times what he expected to make from those proposals and he is entirely capable of doing as suggested.

3. He has benefited from his non-dom wife’s ability to avoid paying UK tax while increasing the tax burden on the rest of us to its highest level since World War 2.

As Akshata Murthy’s husband, Sunak shares his household with her and must, therefore, enjoy some of the benefits of her income. As a non-dom living in the UK, she has been able to avoid paying an estimated £2.1 million per year.

Sunak himself is said to have held a US Green Card, which allows people to live and work permanently in the United States but demands that he pay US tax on his worldwide income, until October last year – long after he became Chancellor in 2020 – meaning he may have avoided paying UK tax for the more-than-four years between that date and his joining the government in 2017.

Meanwhile, by freezing the thresholds at which people move into different tax bands, Sunak has ensured that more people are paying Income Tax at higher rates; he has also introduced a 10 per cent increase in National Insurance payments. The tax burden on UK citizens who have no choice other than to pay up is now at its highest level since the mid-1940s.

It’s a filthy record; it reads more like a charge sheet than a history of achievements.

But Rishi Rich still wants you to believe he and his wife are being smeared by malicious colleagues.

Isn’t it more accurate to say that the skeletons in his closet are coming to light at last?

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Boris Johnson said he would take control of energy prices. Another lie?

Duper’s delight yet again: was this the look on Boris Johnson’s face when he announced his new energy strategy that won’t reduce your bill or help you in any way at all?

Boris Johnson has short-changed the people of the United Kingdom yet again with his hopeless “energy strategy”.

I put the words “energy strategy” in quotation marks above because very little of it makes strategic sense and neither is it in any way energetic.

How is building hugely expensive and polluting nuclear power stations, that won’t be ready until 2050, going to reduce my energy bill today? It isn’t.

How is building offshore wind farms by 2030 going to reduce my energy bill today? It isn’t.

And when is Johnson going to order the privatised energy firms to cut their bills? Never.

That’s right – never.

If he had any intention of helping reduce your bills, his “strategy” would have started with a plan to insulate everybody’s home so that we wouldn’t have to use as much electricity and gas as we do now.

We’re told the Treasury has blocked such ideas but if Johnson really wanted to help us, he would have told Rishi Rich where to stuff his objections.

The fact is that, by his inaction, Johnson has condemned us to endure high energy costs for years, if not decades, to come. It’s what he wants.

It makes a nonsense of his claim that “we’re setting out bold plans to scale up and accelerate affordable, clean and secure energy made in Britain, for Britain… so we can enjoy greater energy self-sufficiency with cheaper bills.”

The people of the UK need cheaper bills now, not in 10 or 20 years time when other costs will have increased, when the energy company executives have become even more greedy and therefore when it won’t make a scrap of difference.

And why is nobody mentioning the elephant in the room – that if Johnson re-nationalised the energy firms, he could wipe away the unnecessary costs of making profits for their (mostly foreign) shareholders at a stroke?

For all the hot air he has spouted, Johnson isn’t helping you at all. He’s helping himself and his fatcat friends with a grotesque lie.

Source: PM promises to take back control of energy costs in long-awaited strategy | Evening Standard

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Working parents are starving for a week at a time because they aren’t paid enough to feed their children

Food bank: Parents who have jobs are being forced to request food packages because their greedy employers don’t pay them enough.

It breaks This Writer’s heart to learn about the suffering of parents in my home town of Bristol, although I’m sure many other towns and cities in the UK are going through the same.

The Bristol Post is reporting that parents in that city have gone without food for up to a week at a time, faced with the agonising choice of either feeding themselves or their kids.

Some of these people could be friends or relatives of mine – or be related to people I know.

They have been arriving at food banks – dizzy due to lack of food and so desperate for nutrition that they won’t wait to get home with food packages, but will eat them on the spot.

Now here’s the real kick in the teeth: Most of these parents are in work but due to the spiralling cost of living, they can’t keep up with their bills.

Families whose children are normally offered school meals struggle during the holidays, especially as they have to finance heating costs.

Apparently this means the number of people visiting north Bristol’s food banks alone can triple.

I write this on the day after the pay of the UK’s top earners passed the amount that most people earn in an entire year.

Top bosses take home 133 times the average wage.

Is it any wonder the people who actually create the profits these “fat cats” guzzle are suffering?

They are starving in order to subsidise a rich person’s greed.

EXTRA: This is self-explanatory, I think – and the result of Conservative neoliberal policies that tell you the wealth of the obscenely rich will “trickle down” to the rest of us.

It doesn’t. The greed of rich employers knows no bounds. Given the opportunity to keep the money that comes to them, that’s what they have done.

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The government’s plan to make sure work WON’T pay!

I’ve got to share with you some words by Justine Greening,the Transport Secretary. She said them on the BBC’s Question Time, broadcast July 28, 2012: “The first thing to do is bring in a welfare cap, so we put an upper limit on how much people can get in welfare in the first place, that is fair. Let’s make sure we reform it in terms of Universal Credit, so that work does always pay.”

How does capping benefit ensure that being in work will always pay?

Whether in work or not, people are finding it hard to make ends meet because housing costs – either rented or mortgaged – are very high and nothing is being done (for example) to cap the amount of rent being charged by private landlords; utility bills are high and nothing is being done to encourage the gas, water and electricity companies to pass on any savings that come their way; and the price of groceries is outstripping people’s ability to pay for them – inflation has dropped but remains above the percentage rate of annual wage rises (unless you are a fat-cat company boss and have awarded yourself a huge salary increase).

Capping the amount available to honest people on benefits will not be fair on them, as they will have even less to live on than at the moment!

Worse still, it won’t help people who are in work! It’s ridiculous for the Transport Secretary – who previously worked in the Treasury, so she should know what she’s talking about – to suggest this. Benefit payments and wages are completely separate from each other.

In fact, while the British people continue to subsist in a low-wage economy, the government is in danger of repeating the debt crisis that created the huge deficit it is supposedly trying to pay off at the moment – the one for which it continually and inaccurately blames the previous Labour government.

It was imprudent bank lending that created the deficit. The government had to step in to save the banks, after they got into so much debt the entire western financial system was put in danger of collapse. The money to do this had to come from somewhere, and that is why it has to be paid back.

But what happens when a poor working person cannot make ends meet, because their job doesn’t pay enough? They borrow money to make up the difference – even if they know they can’t pay the money back!

What happens when too many people borrow money they can’t pay back? The banking system overbalances and we get a debt crisis. That’s where the Coalition is taking working Britain.

The only action the government can take to make work pay would be to reach not only adequate, but exemplary pay deals with public sector workers, and then take action to compel private companies to reach similar deals.

A living wage for hard-working employees – that’s what’s needed.

Vox Political

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Tag Archives: bills

Tory energy minister blames Labour for his own government’s failings

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No more help for households, says Hunt, despite energy price cap rise in April

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How has Shell made £32bn profit from inflated energy prices?

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Is this the sinister truth behind Liz Truss’s energy price cap plan? [VIDEOS]

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