Cost of Living Increases

Debate between Ian Murray and Mike Kane

Wednesday 16th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Do I understand rightly that Labour’s fully costed windfall tax on the energy companies is opposed by both governing parties in Scotland?

[Ian Murray]

It certainly is. To correct the Minister—I hope it is not the third time already; I am on only the second page of my speech—she assumed that the SNP motion backed a windfall tax on oil and gas, but it is actually the opposite. The motion is not to back a windfall tax on oil and gas, but to back a windfall tax on everything but oil and gas—maybe the SNP can clarify that later.

This Chancellor is also presiding over the largest hit to disposable income since the second world war. How are any of those policies helping, alongside, as we have already heard, the largest ever overnight reduction in support for the poorest households through the reduction in universal credit and the scrapping of the triple lock for pensioners? They are making people poorer and taking more money out of their pockets at a time when everything is going up—a cocktail of Government decisions that mean the discussions around the dinner table for many families are about the worry of paying the rent, the mortgage or the energy bill or for the weekly shop or to fill the car they need for work.

Families face a perfect storm of the Government’s own making: rising taxes, rising bills and rising inflation, and lower wages in real terms. This is all the result of over a decade of Conservative mismanagement of the economy. They like to think they have been in government only since 2019, but they have now been in place for 12 years. The policies of a succession of Tory Chancellors have created a low-wage, low-growth insecure economy.

I want to talk for a minute or two about the Scottish Government’s role in this. As the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn) rightly said when he moved the motion, the Scottish Government have a stake in this and I am grateful that the SNP has brought this debate to the House. The SNP is correct to point out the lack of action by the UK Government in trying to tackle this, as we have all discussed, but it is not an observer in this crisis as it is in government and can also help.

Scots are facing the prospect of higher council tax bills, because for over a decade the Scottish Government have decimated local government funding and spent 15 years promising to scrap the council tax—a promise that they continue to break at every election.