KEIR Starmer has defended jetting off on holiday during the cost-of-living crisis as he set out his stall for dealing with soaring fuel bills, which included ruling out the nationalisation of energy giants.
While caretaker PM Boris Johnson has been sunning himself in Slovenia and Greece, Starmer has also been spotted taking a break in Majorca as the UK heads for recession, interest rates and inflation rocket, and the energy price cap continues to climb.
But speaking to broadcast media on Monday he said he “would not apologise” for going on holiday with his family, stressing he had another important job “as a dad”.
He has now finally come out and said how Labour would deal with the current energy crisis and ruled out former prime minister Gordon Brown’s suggestion of nationalising firms that could not offer lower bills.
One of Starmer's 10 pledges when he ran for leader of the party was the nationalisation of energy firms. He insisted "public services should be in public hands, not making profits for shareholders".
Now, under his current plans, Labour would abandon this previous pledge and instead halt energy price rises by extending the windfall tax on oil and gas companies.
He told BBC Radio 5 Live: “We either allow oil and gas companies to go on making huge profits which is what’s happening at the moment or we do something about it.
“We the Labour Party have said, we’ll do something about it. We will stop those price rises and we will extend the windfall tax on the profits that the oil and gas companies didn’t expect to make. So we’ve got a very strong, robust, costed plan here which will stop those rises this autumn.
“It has an additional benefit which is really important, which is because energy prices are a real driver of inflation, this also makes sure that we can reduce inflation from what might even be 13% down to about 9%.”
Asked about nationalisation, he told BBC Breakfast: “The choice we’ve made in our plan is that every single penny that is needed for this plan will go directly to reducing the bills of families.
“If you go down the nationalisation route, then money has to be spent on compensating shareholders and I think in an emergency like this, a national emergency where people are struggling to pay their bills, I think that the right choice is for every single penny to go to reducing those bills.
“Which is why we’ve gone for this across the board, freeze the prices, raise the money for that through the oil and gas companies who’ve made more profit than they were expecting and of course the additional benefit of our plan is that it reduces inflation by up to 4%.”
The "fully-funded" proposals would cost £29 billion and be paid for partly by expanding the windfall tax. The rest would come from the £14bn earmarked by the Government for extra support to cover energy bill rises and £7bn saved in debt interest payments through reduced inflation.
The energy price cap, the maximum companies can charge, is currently set at £1971 a year but is expected to climb to almost £3600 a year in October and more than £4200 in January.
Starmer was asked about the potential length of any price freeze and said he would have to assess the situation in April.
When asked if he and his party should have acted sooner, Starmer said he asked for a “comprehensive” plan from his team at the start of July and they had been working on that for six or seven weeks.
He insisted it was the first time he had had a holiday for three years with his family.
“I said to my team right, I want a fully costed, comprehensive plan and I want to see whether it’s possible for us to freeze energy prices but I need a fully costed plan,” he said.
“I’m not going to apologise for going on holiday with my wife and kids, it’s the first time we’ve had a real holiday for about three years.”
