01 Aug Labour slams alcohol tax changes for ‘clobbering working people’
LABOUR’S Shadow Justice Secretary has slammed the Government’s alcohol tax changes for “clobbering working people”.
Steve Reed MP told GB News: “Well, it’s just another way of clobbering working people, isn’t it, from a government that seems to have got a fetish for just making household budgets squeezed as tightly as they possibly can.
“They crashed the economy last Autumn, didn’t they, with that disastrous mini-budget that sent prices through the roof, that sent mortgages and interest rates and rents [running] out of control.
“This is yet another way that the Government just clobbers hard-working people.”
Asked about the public health implications, in a discussion with Stephen Dixon and Ellie Costello, he added: “Well, I think you do that through education, not by inflicting more financial hardship on families.
“I don’t know why they keep doing this. We’ve got the highest levels of personal taxation under this government that we’ve had for 70 years. The root cause of that is that they failed to grow the economy for 13 years.
“We have to grow the economy if you want to put money back in people’s pockets. This Government has had 13 years, if they knew how to do that we’d have seen it by now.”
On the Government granting new North Sea oil and gas exploration licences, he said: “If you look at what happened over last winter, compared to the 18 months before, that energy prices in this country have gone up three times, a 300% increase.
“And that’s under this current system that the Conservatives seem to want to keep plugging away at as if it could make any difference.”
