Despite the cost-of-living crisis, Just Stop Oil protests and an eerily warm autumn, this is a propitious time to be an oil and gas giant. Shell has announced that its adjusted earnings have more than doubled to £8.3 billion in the three months to the end of September, compared with the year before. It comes off the back of profits of £9.9 billion in the previous quarter.
Companies that turn a profit should and do pay their way in the form of corporation tax. But the case for a higher windfall tax on the oil and gas majors than the proposed 25 per cent surcharge is strong and growing. So much so that even the outgoing boss of Shell, Ben van Beurden, has called such a tax “inevitable” because “one way or another there needs to be government intervention that somehow results in protecting the poorest”.
The Autumn Statement, the replacement for the Halloween fiscal plan set for November 17, is likely to contain tax rises and spending cuts. This at a time when real wages are falling and our public services are at breaking point.
This morning, Conservative Party chairman Nadhim Zahawi acknowledged that the Prime Minister and Chancellor were looking at all options, as indeed they should. No revenue source, not least a higher windfall tax on firms enjoying windfall profits, should be off the table.
Education a priority
Staying in school is critical for an individual’s life chances and a benefit to wider society. In challenging economic times and amid soaring living costs, it has never been more important.
In recognition of that fact, Tower Hamlets council is to become the first in England to pay children from low-income families — that is households earning less than £25,000 a year — if they remain in full-time education after turning 16. It will grant an estimated 1,250 eligible pupils £400 over the next two terms.
Should this system sound familiar, that’s because it echoes the Educational Maintenance Allowance, a £30 a week payment that was scrapped by the Government in 2011. This money can make the difference between a young person staying in school to gain A-levels necessary for a job or to gain entry to university, and dropping out.
Tower Hamlets contains pockets of real disadvantage, and students are facing financial pressure like everyone else. Schemes such as these can be life-changing, helping to equip young people with the skills they need.
In this way, they can also provide our economy with the skilled labour it needs to thrive. A real win-win.
Absurd masterpiece
A musical based on a gay-friendly televangelist and the US Christian Right in the Seventies and Eighties — brought to you by Sir Elton John, James Graham and Jake Shears from the Scissor Sisters — is not a show you ever expected to see. But, as the Evening Standard’s Chief Theatre Critic Nick Curtis explains, it works.
Tammy Faye at the Almeida Theatre is a “carnivalesque takedown of something rotten” and something of a must-see. Transforming this world into a musical merely serves to heighten the absurdity. Roll up and snag yourself a ticket to one of the most irreverent shows in town.
