Sir Keir Starmer has unveiled a plan to counter the Tory government’s tax cut agenda and cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The Labor leader pledged to double the amount of onshore wind power, tripling solar power and more than quadrupling offshore wind power production by 2030 as part of a green energy revolution to the ‘trickle-down’ set out by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng -Fiscal policies to counteract week.
Creating a zero-carbon, self-sufficient power grid would lead to permanently lower energy bills and independence for nations like Russia, according to Labor.
According to information revealed in The Observerthe move could also create half a million jobs and make the UK the first country to have a zero-emission energy system.
It would, according to Sir Keir, cut households’ annual energy bills “forever” by hundreds of pounds and free Brits from the yoke of “dictators” like Russian President Vladimir Putin over energy prices.
Speaking to activists, Sir Keir said the Chancellor’s admission of Tory economic failure would be “hung around their necks” in the next election campaign.
He said: “There is a change in the air. There’s an atmosphere, there’s a sense that Labor is ready to deliver.”
“And don’t we need a change after 12 years of this shower, 12 years of failure under this administration, 10 years of stagnant wages, public services on their knees?”
It is already clear that the Chancellor’s mini-budget on Friday will set the dividing lines for the next general election, with Sir Keir telling Labor supporters: “I disagreed with almost nothing he said in that financial report yesterday, apart from that from his opening sentence when he said there was a “vicious cycle of stagnation”.
“He’s right about that, and that’s their cycle of stagnation. That is the verdict of 12 years of Tory government, a cycle of stagnation, and we must hang that on their necks.”
He said the government’s “driving ideology” was now “to make the rich richer and do nothing for working people”.
Sir Keir Starmer unveiled the plans ahead of the Labor Party conference
(PA)
“If you made £1million yesterday you got a £55,000 tax cut, enough to pay a nurse,” he said.
He added: “It doesn’t run down, it takes the piss.”
Labor has also warned that Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget would give lucrative business tax breaks to “affluent” Tory areas and divert much-needed funds from areas in greater need.
Some wealthier counties, including those where Liz Truss and her deputy sit, are earmarked for “investment zones,” where billions will be handed out to companies to encourage them to invest and grow.
But Labor has questioned how the list of proposed zones – for a policy described by a Cabinet minister as “leveling in action” – was drawn up.
The investment zones have already been dismissed as a rehash of George Osborne’s “enterprise zones,” a failed policy that has created few new jobs over the past decade. An analysis of the Osborne-era zones by the Center for Cities think tank found that they had created fewer than 14,000 jobs — not the projected 54,000 — more than a third of which had been displaced elsewhere.
