If our new PM really wanted to put more cash in our pockets, he’d cut the green levy on energy bills, not the VAT that saves just 86p a week
Daily Telegraph 21/07/26
Sometimes it’s the small things that reveal how tough times are. On Saturday, I went to pick up a suit from the dry cleaner. I asked the owner, a charming smiley man, how business was and he gestured glumly towards a long rail of clean garments in their plastic sheaths. “They’ve been here for weeks. People aren’t coming to collect their stuff,” he said. “They haven’t got the money.” Ours is supposed to be a prosperous market town so it’s a pretty clear sign that all is not well with the economy when picking up the dry cleaning becomes a luxury rather than a necessity. Hard-up people used to default on the mortgage, now it’s a Phase Eight cocktail dress.
Cutting the 5 per cent VAT on electricity (not gas) bills, as Prime Minister Burnham just announced, will save struggling consumers a grand total of 86p a week – not enough to reclaim a tenth of a silk mother-of-the-bride outfit from the dry cleaner. That’s a £45 reduction per annum (but only for six months from October – see what he did there?). Don’t spend it all at once, folks.
“I can do something to give people some breathing space now,” emoted Burnham in a surprisingly stilted, shallow speech outside Number 10. Our And-eh clearly fancies himself as John F. Kennedy but the effect is more new head of Lower Sixth perching on a backwards-facing chair and trying to ingratiate himself with the kids. He seemed nervous, dry-mouthed, in need of a lectern to anchor him.
Mrs Burnham and her unfortunate £890 frock kept their distance – hell hath no fury like a woman who made a panic buy for a big occasion and knows it looks all wrong. (Marie-France has my sympathy. I once bought a Victoria Beckham dress in a sale for an important event and it was a mortifying, overfilled-sausage disaster. The size 12 would have been tight on a nine-year-old gymnast. Posh’s clothes are made for coat-hangers not women. Stick with M&S or Hobbs next time!)
That promise to help people with the cost of living, like Andy Burnham himself, perhaps, turns out to be too good to be true. On day two, Mister “I Want to Do Politics Differently” was already telling big fibs to con the public. The energy price cap went up £3.58 a week on July 1, so the Government is not offering us relief on the previous, appallingly-high energy bills. It’s shaving a pitiful sliver off even more eye-watering bills to come and pocketing the credit. According to sour-grapes Darren Jones, who was knifed along with 10 other ministerial colleagues by that cuddly Northern soul band, Burnham and the Backstabbers, the Government is also lying about the cut being fully funded by the scrapping of (as yet unfunded) Digital ID.
The UK is among the most expensive countries in the world for household electricity. That’s due to reliance on imported wholesale gas and a higher proportion of “policy costs” and green levies which are furtively added to our bills to fund renewable infrastructure. Billions of pounds of British people’s hard-earned money is squandered subsidising Chinese solar panels, fitful windmills and Ed Miliband’s Croesus-rich eco-mates to make that criminally-deluded fantasy, net zero, look achievable. Call it a Luxury Belief tax, a fetish of the liberal elite funded by struggling families.
“I will put care of the people at the heart of everything I do,” vowed the new PM. Really? With his bashful, “Who-me? Aw-Shucks!” smile, Andy makes a lot of being a regular bloke. He’s not a member of that rotten old Southern Westminster club (the one he’s belonged to since 1994 when he became an aide to New Labour minister Tessa Jowell), he can relate to the man in the street, as he never stops telling us. But if Andy genuinely feels people’s pain then why doesn’t he cut the green levies from energy bills which would yield a saving in the hundreds of pounds not insulting pennies?
Because he can’t, that’s why. With his chocolate-drop puppy-eyes and famously long eyelashes, Burnham may be prettier than Starmer – Maybelline of Makerfield – and he certainly speaks in a more relatable manner, but he is a prisoner of an ugly ideology. Andy is a socialist, drastically to the Left of his old boss, Tony Blair (who wisely counselled against making him leader), so all the obvious, painful remedies to our grave national problems (President Trump, not without cause, just called us a “poverty-stricken country”) are anathema to him.
VAT on electricity bills is not the problem. Net zero is the problem. Paying to keep turbines idle to claim they make “cheap electricity” that costs a king’s ransom is the problem.
Burnham laments the 1980s when “Britain took some wrong turns… and large parts of the country were deindustrialised”. He says he wants to put that right. How does he plan on attracting investors when we have the highest industrial electricity prices in the whole world, our wealthiest are either gone or packing their Louis Vuitton trunks, and remaining manufacturers, like the marvellous Denby Pottery, are dropping like flies?
Get rid of the net zero target and start behaving like a country not a cult. It’s obvious, but Burnham dare not alienate the Green and far-Left voters he will need to avoid losing the general election, so the “climate emergency” continues to dictate Labour policy. The human emergency is collateral damage.
Britain is on the brink of economic crisis, taxes are at a 70-year high, double-income families struggle to afford a standard of living that would be considered the bare minimum in similar countries, uncontrolled immigration is tipping us in the direction of civil war, millions of working age are claiming unsustainable benefits and Andy said his priority is… to end rough sleeping. God help us.
It’s the well-meaning policy of a municipal mayor, not a national leader who is serious about arresting decline. One way to help the homeless, of course, would be to not fill HMOs and hostels with migrants. The Centre for Social Justice reckons a quarter of rough sleepers, rising to half in London, are migrants. If we leave the European Convention on Human Rights (now Conservative and Reform policy) and repeal the Human Rights Act, Britain can legally deport hundreds of thousands of undocumented males who have no right to be here. That would leave plenty of room in hostels for our own people, especially veterans. Illegal migration is a national emergency spiralling out of control. (My source in the asylum system estimates there is a 72,000 backlog in “human rights” claims alone.) But Prime Minister Burnham’s “values” prevent him even acknowledging that, let alone taking the necessary steps to put the British people first.
Amazingly, he plans to do the exact opposite. Burnham will reverse the popular cuts to the UK’s aid budget made by his predecessors. (In her only sensible move, Rachel Reeves slashed it to 0.3 per cent of Gross National Income (GNI).) A roadmap for returning the UK to spending 0.7 per cent of GNI will be drawn up by the new Foreign Secretary.
Ed Miliband now has the chance to do for Britain’s international reputation what he did for British steel. Our aid spending was supposed to fall from £15.4bn in 2024 to £9.2bn in 2027. Now, we must find another few billion that we desperately need for our own national defence and donate it to causes such as building “eco-system resilience” in Namibia or traditional opera projects in Shanghai (China, as you may have noticed, is rather better off than we are. Can’t we get aid from them?). Bear in mind that we will be BORROWING that vast sum (to give away) at hugely unfavourable rates to placate the student activists on Burnham’s backbenches.
It makes a mockery of Andy’s claim to be putting the care of people at the heart of everything he does. Instead, what we see is populism of the Left designed to see off the threat of Reform in the Red Wall. A cynical chameleon masquerading as saviour of the country has staged a ruthless coup and now dishes out bribes to the peasants to buy popularity he can exploit in a snap election.
Will the British people really fall for Maybelline of Makerfield fluttering his eyelashes, smiling coyly and spouting slushy T-shirt mottoes like “Hope in every heart”? There is a real danger that they will, I’m afraid. Keir Starmer was so hated his successor was bound to look appealing by comparison. Struggling voters deserve so much better than Andy’s con tricks.
“People want politics to be done differently,” our new PM says. No, Andy. People couldn’t care less about politics, or devolution, or putting metro mayors in the Lords, or creating a No 10 of the North, or Manchesterism, or rent controls, or 10-year plans, or whatever costly and pointless innovations you come up with to avoid making hard choices. What people want, and with a growing sense of desperation, is competent government that does what they voted for. More money in their pocket, lower taxes, affordable energy, foreign rapists deported, children taught to love their country and appreciate its history, less of the country’s money wasted on migrants and idlers.
Oh, and being able to afford to collect the dry-cleaning would be nice.
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