Extract from David Lammy's interview on BBC's Sunday Morning show

Sunday, 6 February 2022 14:32

David Lammy, MP, Shadow Foreign Secretary, appeared this morning on the BBC's Sunday Morning Show. Extract Q (Sophie Raworth): Global inflation is at its highest since 2008. Could any government really do anything to keep the prices down? A (David Lammy, MP): Well we’ve got to. That’s why you’re elected. And what we’ve said is that the North Sea Oil and gas companies have had record bumper profits this year – there should be a...Request free trial

David Lammy, MP, Shadow Foreign Secretary, appeared this morning on the BBC's Sunday Morning Show.

Extract

Q (Sophie Raworth): Global inflation is at its highest since 2008. Could any government really do anything to keep the prices down?

A (David Lammy, MP): Well we’ve got to. That’s why you’re elected. And what we’ve said is that the North Sea Oil and gas companies have had record bumper profits this year – there should be a windfall tax. George Osborne had a windfall tax, Gordon Brown had a windfall tax. That’s the way to raise the money so that you can get money into people’s pockets, and under our plan we would give people, the poorest people, £600. Under the government’s plan it’s £350 and actually 200 of it is a loan that you’re asking people to pay back over five years, which is a big gamble because of course prices may continue to rise. So I think it’s important that you think hard about who can bear that cost and it seems to use that oil and gas companies can bear that cost, and not the general public. By the way, they did this in France. The French have just levied EDF 8.4 billion they’ve asked to keep prices down. We should be doing the same in this country.

Q: They are going to be making huge profits this year. I think 40 billion combined was one of the figures I read this morning, but when you say windfall tax you are really meaning a windfall tax as a one off tax, so you’re just going to take it once?

A: Well, we’ve costed from April through to next April. That gets people through to next winter as well, and of course we’ll look and see what the situation is at that point.

Q: But that is the point, isn’t it, because Ofgem itself says it’s hard to predict how long gas prices are going to stay high and they expect continued significant upward pressure on prices. This is not going to be a short term problem.

A: But the bottom line is Shell announced momentous profits. They will go in dividends and shareholder buy back schemes. It’s wrong that actually they should make the money. You’ve got to help the public at this time and that’s the scheme that Labour are proposing. Strangely our scheme is costing £6.6 billion, the government scheme costs £9 billion because it’s not properly targeted, so I think we’ve also come up with a plan that’s fiscally responsible.