Rachel Reeves has gone through a Damascene conversion on energy bills. As of today, her position is the Truss-era universal cap was a “mistake” because it benefitted the wealthy and added to the national debt. She is right: the taxpayer should never be paying to heat millionaires’ swimming pools. She didn’t say this in opposition.
In fact, here is what she said in 2022 when the then-Chancellor Jeremy Hunt cut the Energy Price Guarantee from two years to six months:
“Today, the Chancellor has scaled back help with energy bills for families and pensioners. It prompts the question yet again: why will the Government not bring in a proper windfall tax on energy producers to help foot the bill for consumers, and when will the current Chancellor publish in full the Government’s estimates of the windfall profits of the energy giants over the next two years?”
When the cap was set to rise to £3,000, she also went on the attack. Apparently under a Labour government, it would have stayed at £2,500. At no point did she criticise the universal rollout. To stand at the despatch box and attack a policy she previously claimed did not go far enough is astonishing. Or at least it would be, if it wasn’t the usual routine nowadays…
