Three in four Tory voters back Labour’s emergency energy plan

Three quarters of Tory voters support Labour’s emergency energy plan as they come under increasing pressure to do more to address the cost of living crisis.

Yesterday, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer laid out plans for his £29 billion emergency plan to prevent energy bills rising to unprecedented costs in the next six months. 

Starmer explained that the package would be mostly paid for by a big increase in tax on oil and gas company profits, something the Conservative Party has famously failed to implement throughout the crisis. 

He also pledged to backdate the windfall tax to January, reduce inflation with lower energy bills and to drop the £400 energy rebate and other pledges made by Tory leadership candidates to raise £14 billion. 

This plan, Starmer promised, would save people £1,000 on their energy bills. 

However, while both the Tory leadership contenders – foreign secretary Liz Truss and former chancellor Rishi Sunak – have rejected Starmer’s proposal of freezing bills, reports by The Times claim that three in four Tory voters support his plan.

Energy companies have also pitched their own version of Labour’s offer, with the industry proposing a voluntary pause on bills for two years, with a promise to spread the cost of the gas price crisis over a decade or more.

The energy minister Greg Hands, meanwhile, said the Conservative government is ‘working up further options for this winter’ to present to a new prime minister, and acknowledged that ‘more is going to have to be done’. 

He also criticised Labour’s ‘magical solution to just wish it all away’, saying price increases could not be ‘abolished’ and that freezing bills would ‘inevitably lead to higher taxes’. 

Current Prime Minister Boris Johnson also warned that freezing bills is a ‘very expensive thing to do’, saying: “What [the bill freeze] does achieve is to protect everybody entirely from the increases in energy prices.

“So if that’s what you want to achieve, that’s what you need to do. But you do need to recognise that is a very expensive thing to do.”