RACHEL REEVES’S decision to protect fat cat bankers has lost the public £15 billion — money that could have saved freezing pensioners and hundreds of thousands of children from going hungry, a damning new report found today.
Campaigners for a windfall tax on banking profits slammed the Chancellor after it emerged that Britain’s four biggest banks made a record £45.9bn in profits for 2024.
Positive Money found that the policy, called for by unions and left MPs, would have brought in an additional £14.7bn for the Exchequer this year after Lloyds Bank became the last of the so-called Big Four to announce its £6bn pre-tax profits for last year.
The group calculated that increasing the existing surcharge on bank profits from 3 to 35 per cent, in line with the government’s windfall tax on energy companies, could have raised this sum from Lloyds, HSBC, Barclays and NatWest alone.
This would be enough to cover the cost of scrapping the two-child benefit cap — fives times over.
Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves wear the uniform of the rich and powerful. They have all had clothes bought for them by multi-millionaire Labour donor Lord Alli. CORRECTION: It appears that Rachel Reeves clothing was provided by Juliet Rosenfeld.Keir Starmer says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.
There are plenty of ways we could enter a new global crisis. One might stem from a pandemic, a cyber attack, or any one of the current wars escalating out of control. Already underway, though, is the crisis of accelerating climate change.
That unfolding global catastrophe has long existed but is becoming more urgent week by week, as climate scientists issue increasingly strident warnings over what is happening and we see hard evidence in the form of extreme weather around the world.
The crisis is not remotely being met by the changes required to turn things around, and certainly not by the essential rapid economic decarbonisation.
The one saving grace is that there may still be time to make the changes, which raises the question of whether individual countries can push them forward. In a previous openDemocracy column, I briefly explored this question in relation to the UK, which was thought to be in a strong position to push change last July, when the apparently climate-focussed Labour Party had just won the general election.
Yet within a few months, there was bitter disappointment among climate activists and many others as Labour’s plans were scaled down and replaced by the dominant theme of ‘growth at almost any price’.
But, still, it is worth taking a more thorough look at what could be done by a country such as the UK – which is wealthy and has huge national potential for developing renewable energy resources – if it had a government determined to respond to climate breakdown in time.
We start with the need to implement an immediate and sustained acceleration of wind and solar power at a considerable scale, effectively trebling the rate of development within at most a couple of years. It will be supported by heavy investment in the power grid and by expanding the national skills base.
In parallel to this, the UK should immediately begin national investment in home and workplace insulation, as well as increasing the use of solar panels and solar thermal systems.
The experience of the late Noughties and early 2010s is relevant here, showing how modest fiscal measures can act as effective catalysts for wider progress. Before leaving office in 2010, Labour had set out to encourage home-based solar panels with a generous feed-in tariff system. That scheme survived and indeed thrived during the 2010-15 coalition government, mainly because of the Liberal Democrats’ insistence, but collapsed when the Conservatives came to power in 2015 and cut it back.
The UK could also speed up the transition from petrol and diesel transport to electric power, coupled with much-increased investment in public transport. There are many other steps to take relating to issues such as methane emissions and food production, but these are also areas where investment will pay off handsomely.
Of course, even if we succeed in curbing carbon dioxide emissions, it will take at least another 30 years to reverse the effects they’ve had, so we will need to invest heavily in the many resources needed to minimise the impact of storms, floods and wildfires to come. Coping with these will require increases in emergency services, which can be aided by a substantial change in the role of the military.
One eye should be kept on Donald Trump and the likely damage he and his people will do in the next four years. As well as head-hunting sacked US climate researchers (which will do much to restore optimism across the whole climate science community), the UK and other rich nations can do much to plug the research gaps that will inevitably emerge as the US president uses his wrecking ball.
We should at least treble our funding for key research into the whole global ecosystem, including atmospheric, oceanographic and polar studies and those in relatively under-researched regions of the world. Funding for carbon capture and storage, meanwhile, should be scaled back, as this will take far too long to have an impact.
A further task will be to boost the transition to renewables across the more marginalised parts of the Global South, especially if that enables states to make the transition to low-carbon economies by leap-frogging their current mix of energy uses.
All of this will be hugely beneficial in straight political terms, with the impact increasingly obvious within two or three years. Energy prices will fall, fuel poverty will ease, and effective political leadership will act as an effective catalyst. The UK would get a reputation for a truly relevant response to a manifest global security challenge.
The costs will not be exorbitant, either. Money could be redirected from the military, which is expected to cost UK taxpayers £59.8bn over the next financial year, up from £56.9, despite climate breakdown exceeding just about every other security challenge facing us.
There are plenty of other sources of funding, too. One symbolic if small option would be to remove all subsidies for fossil fuel production and transfer them to renewables. A more substantial one would be to increase efforts to prevent tax avoidance, and beyond that will be to greatly increase the control of illegal tax evasion, including the myriad forms of tax havens in which the UK is a world leader.
Beyond that there is plenty of scope to increase tax on those best able to bear it, undoing the cuts made under Thatcher in the 1980s, when the top rate of tax was slashed from 83% to 40% and even now is only 45%. Given the obscene levels of wealth that we have in 21st century Britain, largely down to the changes of those Thatcher years, just a thousand people now possess close to a trillion pounds of wealth. That surely calls for the introduction of substantial wealth taxes.
Devil’s advocates might say that the changes required are too big and too expensive, but that misses one key point. A decade or two ago, one might have reasonably argued that we needed proof that something was going wrong before we took such ‘extreme’ action. But we can now see with our own eyes that climate breakdown is happening.
This point will only be reinforced every time a catastrophic weather event hits any part of the world. The UK could be at the forefront of the necessary transformation that has to come globally. It could finally have found a worthwhile post-imperial role.
An F-35 arriving back at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, June 24, 2019
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Al-Haq general director Shawan Jabarin said: “F-35 partner nations, including the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, have assessed Israel’s use of these jets and concluded that the risk of violations of international humanitarian law is significant enough to halt direct sales of key components.
“However, components continue to reach Israel indirectly, highlighting the urgent need for the entire F-35 programme to be brought into compliance with international law.”
Human Rights Watch UK director Yasmine Ahmed said: “The government must close the loopholes and end its legal gymnastics — failure to do so displays either a misunderstanding of the government’s legal obligations or a wilful disregard for them.”
Marte Hansen Haugan, president of Norwegian campaign group Changemaker, said: “The unwillingness to halt or pause the production of F-35 components reflects an interpretation of national and international law that excludes Palestinian lives.”
Henry Off, of Canadian Lawyers for International Human Rights said: “In clear violation of its legal obligations, Canada continues to maintain its regulatory loopholes that allow components and parts to reach Israel’s F-35s indirectly through the United States.”
UK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWREGenocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, has asked Ofgem to crack down on inaccurate and large bills. Photograph: Ina Fassbender/AFP/Getty Images
Exclusive: Whitehall source expects bills in England, Scotland and Wales to rise by about £9 a month over the next three months
Ed Miliband has urged the energy watchdog to take swift action as it emerged that the typical energy bill could soar by more than £100 a year amid a rise in global gas prices.
A Whitehall source said they expected bills in England, Scotland and Wales to increase by about £9 a month over the next three months in another challenge to government plans to tackle the cost of living.
They blamed volatile global gas prices linked to the end of the transit deal that enabled gas to flow to Europe, through Ukraine, from Russia.
Miliband, the energy secretary, has written an urgent letter to Ofgem, saying the price rise means the energy regulator must move faster to protect consumers.
This month, gas prices hit a two-year high, exacerbated by the lack of gas storage in Britain and Europe, combined with colder weather though prices have begun to stabilise. Cornwall Insight, a consultancy which produces closely watched forecasts for the energy price cap, is set to release its latest forecast on Tuesday.
Gwynt y Mor, the world’s 2nd largest offshore wind farm located eight miles offshore in Liverpool Bay, off the coast of North Wales
NEW public cash for green energy may be a “step in the right direction” but is “nowhere near enough” to meet the government’s own jobs and manufacturing targets, unions warned today.
The rebuke came as Energy Secretary Ed Miliband invited applications to the £200 million Clean Energy Bonus scheme, offering financial support for green developers on condition they funnel investments and jobs into into areas suffering from deprivation or reliant on the fossil fuel sector.
The government had set targets to boost domestic production in the green supply chain by 60 per cent by 2030, hoping to create 35,000 jobs in areas essential to a transition from fossil fuels, which are often reliant on imports such as wind blades and transmission cables.
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TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said: “We should be making the towers, foundation and cables for zero carbon energy here – instead of paying other countries and importing them.
“The Clean Industry Bonus is an essential step in this direction. It will help the North Sea workforce find good quality, secure jobs and boost UK industry.”
