My statement about why the Economy and Cost of Living is my priority
As someone who works for a national bank, I deliver Money Mentoring sessions and increasingly meet people who have nothing left to cut back on. Many face soaring interest rates on their rent or mortgage, credit cards, and overdrafts, which outstrip their squeezed incomes. This leaves them deciding between heating their homes, eating, or living in persistent debt.
While these hardships play out inside our homes, oil and gas companies report massive profits, with some even reducing output to keep prices high. The biggest banks benefit from tax breaks amounting to around £4 billion, thanks to Conservative policies. Meanwhile, monopoly water companies, pump sewage into our rivers while pleading financial distress due to debts incurred from paying past dividends. And pharmaceutical companies are prioritizing share buybacks over research and development, which could create jobs and innovate new treatments.
It’s time for a fairer economy that works for everyone and real action on the cost of living.
Lib Dem plan to tackle the cost-of-living crisis
✅ Help people with the cost of living and their energy bills by implementing a proper, one-off windfall tax on the super-profits of oil and gas producers and traders.
✅ Protect the 'Triple-lock' on pensions, ensuring pensioners are protected from inflation.
✅ Make taxes fair, ensuring that tax burdens don’t fall disproportionately on low earners, reversing the Conservatives’ tax cuts for big banks, and abolishing the separate Capital Gains tax-free allowance, to tax income from wealth more similarly to income from work.
✅ Give taxpayers real value for money, by clamping down on tax avoidance and evasion, narrowing the tax gap, and giving HMRC more resources to properly tackle tax fraud, which has cost the taxpayer billions under the Conservatives.
✅ Safeguard the UK’s economic prosperity while making the investments our country needs. We will make sure that day-to-day spending does not exceed the amount of money raised in taxes over the medium term, with additional flexibility during periods of economic crisis.
✅ Uphold fiscal responsibility by ensuring that all fiscal events are accompanied by forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility.
