A £400 energy bill discount and a windfall tax on oil and gas firms have been unveiled only to cover up “horrendous partying” in Downing Street, Labour’s deputy leader told a crowd in Newcastle.
Angela Rayner claimed on Thursday night that the £15bn worth of measures revealed by Chancellor Rishi Sunak to help tackle the cost of living crisis were designed to distract from the Partygate scandal, after the release of the long-awaited Sue Gray report the day before. Speaking at a Trade Union Congress rally at Newcastle Civic Centre, the Ashton-under-Lyne MP slammed the “Bullingdon Club they have put into No 10 to get pissed up while everyone else is losing relatives and are living on the bread line”.
Alongside the £400 discount and the £5bn levy on oil and gas giants, Mr Sunak also revealed further one-off payments of £600 to households on benefits, £300 for pensioners, and £150 for the disabled. But Ms Rayner, Keir Starmer’s deputy, said the measures have come too late and would not help families already struggling with their bills before prices rise again later this year.
She told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “He could have done this months ago, Labour have been calling for them to take action months ago, and today’s announcements don’t really do anything now. We know the prices are going to go up again in October and people are really fearful, they are struggling, already turning the heating off and worrying about how they are going top feed their families.
“What the Tories have done today is to try and distract from what is going on in their government and it is nowhere near enough.”
She added: “It is not even a month since they whipped their Tory MPs to vote against a windfall tax. Labour brought that motion forward and they voted against it. They have done this today to distract from the Sue Gray inquiry and to try and save Boris Johnson’s neck.”
Speaking at the TUC event, Unison general secretary Christina McAnea also branded the Chancellor’s pledges a “cynical move” timed to divert attention from the findings of the Sue Gray inquiry, which have already prompted four Tory MPs to call on Boris Johnson to resign.
Mr Sunak has vehemently denied such allegations. Speaking during a Q&A with Money Saving Expert founder Martin Lewis, the Chancellor said: "I can categorically assure you that that had no bearing on the timing for us announcing this support, and I can give you my absolute assurance on that and my word. The reason we acted today was because we had more certainty about what will happen to energy prices in the autumn.”
He added: “I said in the spring, I said in February that of course we would look to provide more support if necessary and that we would do that when we had a better sense of what would happen to energy prices.
"That’s the single biggest thing driving the increase in the cost of living and no-one in February could tell me with any certainty what was going to happen with the price cap in October, so I didn’t want to say something that would prove to be wrong. I wanted to wait for enough time so I had a sense of the scale of the problem and then we could size our support appropriately, and that’s what we’ve done."
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