Rishi Sunak’s first 100 days

This is an audio transcript of the Payne’s Politics podcast episode: ‘Rishi Sunak’s first 100 days’

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George Parker
Rishi Sunak marked his 100 days in office this week, an event beloved of political journalists. And there was a video from 10 Downing Street to mark it.

Rishi Sunak
Trust is earned and I will earn yours. Halve the inflation, grow the economy, reduce debt, cut waiting lists and stop the boats. I believe that those are the country’s priorities and I want all of you to hold me accountable for delivering all of that. We really can change our country, for the better.

George Parker
The prime minister likes setting and marking his own homework, but the reality has been a little more complicated. Strikes, ministerial resignations and sleaze are among the issues that have cropped up in his first hundred days that didn’t feature on Sunak’s list of tests that he’s setting himself.

News clip
The IMF predicts that Britain’s economy will shrink by more than half a per cent this year, making it the only leading nation expected to enter a recession.

Keir Starmer
The deputy prime minister was facing 24 separate allegations of bullying.

News clip
 . . . 2010, as many as half a million workers on strike across the UK, the biggest day of industrial action in over a decade. (Sounds of protests)

Keir Starmer
A prime minister overseeing chaos, overwhelmed at every turn, can’t even deal with tax avoiders in his own cabinet (MPs shout “Hear!”). Is he starting to wonder if this job is just too big for him? (MPs shout “Hear! Hear!”)

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George Parker
Welcome to Payne’s Politics, your essential insider guide to Westminster from the Financial Times with me, George Parker, in the hot seat vacated by Seb Payne, just for the next few weeks before the pod is relaunched with a great new format. In this week’s episode, we’ll be looking at Sunak’s first 100 days and what they tell us about how he’s shaping up as prime minister. I’m delighted to be joined by the top FT commentators, Miranda Green and Stephen Bush. And then, we’ll be discussing the government’s approach to net zero. Is Rishi Sunak getting it right or is he being held back by Tory MPs, who share David Cameron’s famous observation that the party should ditch the “green crap”? Jim Pickard and Robert Shrimsley will be here. Thank you all for joining.

So Rishi Sunak marks an important landmark in his premiership this week. But the 100 days anniversary was marred by a wave of mass strikes. Reports that Dominic Raab, his deputy, is facing a growing number of bullying allegations, which he denies, of course. And a looming row with Tory MPs over Brexit. Miranda Green and Stephen Bush are here with me. Stephen, can I start with you? How would you assess Rishi Sunak’s first 100 days?

Stephen Bush
So I think in some ways he’s stopped the bleeding around the Conservative party to a point where we no longer believe that the Conservative party might cease to exist after the next election. A lot of the sort of postmortems of the first hundred days seem to have completely forgotten what he inherited. They quite rightly are focusing on the other half of that, which is it does not look like he is going to get them into a position where they can win the next election. But the strange problem he has is he’s had a pretty successful hundred days in terms of stabilising the Conservative party, stabilising the UK and the markets, other than the mortgage markets. But he hasn’t done a good job at all of explaining to the party what a mess they were in or really getting any credit from either the party or the country for any of that work. Yeah, I think if you told Conservative MPs when he took over where they’d be now, they would have gone, “Well, thank God. You know, we’re 35 points behind in the polls”. Now you speak to them and they go, “Well yeah, but what’s he done in the intervening 99 days?”

George Parker
Yeah, exactly. Now, Miranda, what does the first hundred days tell us about Rishi Sunak’s approach to government, would you say?

Miranda Green
Well, I think you have to start with the promise he made on day one: restoring the very idea of integrity and professionalism after the Johnson and Truss era. And the problem for Rishi Sunak is that he hasn’t come in fresh. He’s the third Conservative prime minister since the last general election. And he’s got to sort of reinvent conservatism in a very short time period with maybe 18 months or so to go to the next election with this terrible kind of hangover from the Johnson and Truss period. And I think the problem is, is that as we saw with that day one promise — integrity and professionalism — it’s really, really hard for him to start afresh and keep that pledge. So what they’ve had him do is do some sort of political tricks that seem to have worked for prime ministers in the past, right? So you invent five pledges by which you want to be . . . 

George Parker
Hmm.

Miranda Green
. . . measured by the electorate, but actually the five pledges that they nicked from New Labour were quite measurable objectives. Rishi Sunak’s are quite vague and also leave out some core areas that the public care about, like for example, education. On integrity, he’s got a hangover problem of all these people who are still in his government, who were also in the Truss and Johnson governments and who bring with them this awful baggage of sleaze in one way or another. And of course, at the moment the Raab problem is his biggest problem. But we’ve also had the Zahawi issue, we’ve had the Gavin Williamson issue, and we’ve also got Suella Braverman with question marks over her. And she was reappointed by Rishi Sunak on his first day in office. So he’s really struggling, I think, at this core task of showing that you’ve got impetus and some sort of mission to the beginning of your prime ministership.

George Parker
Yeah and Stephen, I mean, a lot of water has passed under the bridge in the last three months or so, hasn’t it? The Liz Truss interlude is almost like a fever dream somewhere. (Laughter) So we’re parked in the collective imagination of the Conservative party. But what is interesting, I think, is the way that Rishi Sunak’s approval ratings have been falling quite sharply in the last few weeks, and it’s very rare for a prime minister’s approval ratings to go up during their time in office. And some of Keir Starmer’s criticisms of Rishi Sunak not being big enough for the job seem to be landing, don’t they?

Stephen Bush
Yeah. As you say, leaders mostly don’t get more popular in office. Now, of course, the hope, if you’re the Conservative party, is that the economy comes to your rescue. But looking at the very bleak projections we have, that doesn’t seem to be that likely either. Yeah, contact what Miranda just said. One of the problems, I think actually the biggest and most significant mistake he made in the first 100 days was that promise about integrity and accountability, because we know that he’s inherited a very weak political position. And if you’re in a weak political position, well, you can’t prioritise integrity. You’ve got to prioritise passing legislation and keeping your party together. And it’s not a good idea in politics to make a promise that is going to turn you into a liar very quickly. And I think it’s gonna be hard for him to maintain the advantages he had when he became leader. You know, the real feelings of warmth that he did attract in some quarters. I think it’s gonna be really hard for him to maintain that, given that he’s got this millstone of accountability and integrity every level around his neck.

George Parker
And some of these mistakes are self-inflicted, aren’t they, Miranda? Because, you know, we hear a lot of people talking about the fact that all these scandals began during the Boris Johnson era. But nevertheless, look at the people that Rishi Sunak appointed to his first cabinet. There were people like Suella Braverman, who’d basically had to resign a week earlier for breaching the ministerial code. Gavin Williamson, who had to resign previously in a scandal. Nadhim Zahawi, who had his tax affairs in the public domain or is being reported by the media at the time. And of course, there were these allegations swirling around Dominic Raab. So these are self-inflicted mistakes, aren’t they?

Miranda Green
Well, that’s right. And that all helps the Labour party’s main mission, which is to attack Sunak’s judgment and Sunak’s ability to be a strong enough leader to put the Johnsonian past of the Conservative government since the last election behind him. And I think part of the problem for him is the question mark about whether he actually is very good at politics in the sense of sort of whether he actually relishes the political part of the job of being prime minister. I mean, I don’t know about you guys, but I thought it was incredibly revealing when a few weeks ago at prime minister’s questions when he was asked about all of the industrial action across the public sector. He talked about the union leaders being unreasonable. It was very interesting and revealing because it was problematic on two levels. One, if you go into politics and become a prime minister, you know, you are not gonna encounter any reasonable people. And this kind of management consultancy view of the world where you’re dealing with rational people and only rational problems, that’s really not politics. And two, a lot of the public, as we know, for example, from the polling on the teachers’ strikes on Walkout Wednesday, as it was called this week — quite a significant portion of the public are actually backing the strikers. So is he calling the British public unreasonable for thinking that . . . 

George Parker
Mmmm . . . 

Miranda Green
 . . . the public sector is creaking at the seams? Really, that’s the problem, do you know what I mean? That this idea of can he actually do the job? It’s more than a technocratic job. And he does come across as such a technocrat.

George Parker
He does. I mean, you can tell that he spends time looking under the bonnet of problems and he gets officials in and he actually really enjoys getting to grips with thorny issues like the boats or hospital emergency department problems and so on. But Stephen, Miranda is making that point and you hear often said of Rishi Sunak, is he actually good at politics? When you look back at some of the mistakes he made, even as chancellor, you know, rejecting a windfall tax for months, even though you could see eventually he was gonna have to give in on that; rejecting Marcus Rashford’s campaign for free school meals. Again, something you could see, well, he was on the wrong side of public opinion and then not being quick enough to correct the mistakes in the first place.

Stephen Bush
Yeah, but one of the interesting things about politics (inaudible) is I think Rishi and Keir have a lot in common — both very experienced outside of politics, not that experienced in politics. And they both have had very sharp learning curves because of the civil wars that their parties have been in, in that time. But at the moment, I think it feels pretty uncontroversial to say that Keir Starmer has shown that he can learn on the job politically. It does feel a bit that Rishi Sunak can’t. One of the interesting challenges of course when you become prime minister is you have to stop being a departmental minister. You have to provide that strategic direction that can only come from Downing Street. I feel often when I’m talking to ministers at the moment, some of them like it, some of them are complaining, but in odd way what they aren’t getting is that direction from the boss. They’re essentially getting . . . 

George Parker
Mmm.

Stephen Bush
. . . Downing Street as an auxiliary minister of state, which doesn’t really work.

George Parker
Yeah. You speak to ministers, so there’s very little control from the centre and the civil service as well coming from Simon Case, hardly any. So pressure from the top, which is fascinating. Miranda, Stephen mentioned earlier, of course, that his great success, Rishi Sunak in the first few months of his premiership was stabilising the economy and digging the country out of the hole that Liz Truss has got us into. But already Tory MPs seem to have quite short memories. He’s facing this new pressure from the Tory right for tax cuts now, which is incredible, isn’t it?

Miranda Green
I think the next few weeks are gonna be completely fascinating actually, and the run-up to the March Jeremy Hunt Budget, because on the backbenches they’re really pushing for a swing to the right when what delivered stability after the Truss-Kwasi Kwarteng disaster that sent the market spiralling was actually achieved by being quite unconservative reverting to the Treasury orthodoxy that the right of the Tory party was so determined to destroy. So the backbenchers seem to want to pull the Sunak government almost back in the direction of the failed Truss-Kwarteng experiment and how they think that’s gonna help them, I don’t know. But ideologically they believe that tax cuts are the path to prosperity for the country. Whether they brook opposition to that point of view enough to support the Budget properly when we get to March, it’s gonna be very interesting to see. And I think to Stephen’s point, you know, this idea of these short memories, because also if you think of another sort of success of Rishi Sunak as an individual when he was chancellor was of course, the furlough scheme, which was phenomenally generous. The memory of that largesse fades with the people who would appreciate that sort of leader now in Downing Street. But unfortunately, that idea of him as doing unconservative things that are Big Government lingers on the backbenches where it does him damage.

George Parker
Yeah. And Stephen, I’ve kind of . . . looking at the Dominic Raab question which has come to dominate this week at Westminster, the allegations surrounding him and the revelations that more and more people are coming forward and making these allegations, which he denies. Do you think he should step down while this inquiry by Adam Tolley KC is going on?

Stephen Bush
Politically, no, I don’t think so. What was the case for putting Dominic Raab in there, originally? It was, one, he had been loyal and actually at the point when everyone else had fled, basically when the ministers are going, “I know I said Liz Truss would be a disaster, but what I actually meant was, she’d be a brilliant prime minister”. You’d think you have to, in a parliamentary democracy, reward that kind of loyalty in order to keep the show on the road. So it was the right call to have him in then, just from a party management perspective. And I think you do have to have due process once you have started the process. He’s there because he’s an ultra-loyal supporter of Rishi Sunak, obviously the future of the European Court of Human Rights and how that engaged with the boats he’s gonna be so core to everything this government wants to do. And I think in some ways the huge problem Rishi Sunak has on the Raab issue — and who knows what the inquiry will find — but I can’t really work out how he could replace him. He might have to get rid of him, but there isn’t really, I think, a politician out there who is legally qualified, of the same mind as Rishi Sunak on the boats issue and is a proven loyalist, you know, to mount my hobbyhorse about why it was a stupid promise to make about integrity and accountability. (George laughs) This is why you shouldn’t make that promise, because politics is primarily about loyalty and policy. It’s not, unfortunately, about integrity and accountability.

George Parker
Miranda, finally, the other big story of the week, of course, was the strikes and the wave of strikes on Wednesday.

Miranda Green
Yeah.

George Parker
Among the worst political strikes we’ve seen. How much damage do you think this is causing Rishi Sunak? Why do you think he seems prepared to ride it out, at least for the time being, doesn’t he?

Miranda Green
Yeah. The decision to sort of tough it out is a fascinating one, isn’t it? Because some of the unions seem to say that the government’s not even engaging in genuine pay negotiation where they are in the room. I mean, I think that public patience and public support for the strikers is sort of different when you look at the different sectors. For example, I was mentioning the teachers’ strike earlier on. There was some very interesting polling which showed that if you actually have a child in a state school, you’re quite likely to support the teachers’ strike that happened on Wednesday. But amongst the general population, there’s a slight lead for those who aren’t sympathetic. So I think it’s gonna be very interesting to watch how that shifts. When it comes to things like the NHS or indeed the trains, you know, most of us are exposed to the chaos that is caused by the industrial action. So our sympathy is sort of strained by both sides.

George Parker
And of course we’ve got coming up after the first hundred days, the next hundred days can be pretty tricky, aren’t they? You’ve got the strikes to deal with, you’ve got the Northern Ireland protocol, which of course we haven’t for once discussed on the podcast; the boats question, which Stephen’s alluded to, where we’re waiting for the legislation. Will that be enough to satisfy Tory MPs? And then of course the Budget and this whole clamour for tax cuts from the Tory right. So a daunting in-tray for the new prime minister. But for the time being, Stephen Bush and Miranda Green, thanks very much.

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The green industrial revolution is coming. The US is ready for it with President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and its $369bn of subsidies for green technologies. The EU is preparing too, responding to those US subsidies with an easing of tax credit rules. But what about the UK? Well, the Tory MP Chris Skidmore has done a review. It calls on the Tories to understand that the clean energy drive is vital to prosperity. And that review came a couple of weeks before the oil giant Shell announced record annual profits of almost $40bn, the highest in its 115-year history. Ed Miliband, Labour’s climate change spokesman, said the UK government’s messaging is totally off the mark.

Ed Miliband
And this is head-scratching, to put it mildly. They have built in a massive loophole just for fossil fuel companies, not for other energy companies, so that if they make so-called investments, they get massive tax breaks for that. So they are incentivising investments in fossil fuels, not in renewables.

George Parker
I’m joined by our commentator Robert Shrimsley and the deputy political editor Jim Pickard. Robert, you wrote a column on the government’s green agenda this week. Are they getting it wrong?

Robert Shrimsley
I think it’s more nuanced now. I think the government has come up with a number of policies, number of subsidies, important legislation, most of which is moving the country in the right direction. The criticism that people make of this, and that certainly the Skidmore review makes, is not that they lack good intent, but that they lack delivery, that they are too half-hearted, that many of the investment plans they announced are subject to, say, annual investment funding rounds rather than, say 10-year funding rounds, which you might see in some cases in Germany, that they’re a bit stop-start. There are a number of things they want to do. We’re still waiting for the roadmaps. So, for example, we’re still waiting for them to offer a clear path for small modular nuclear reactors, an area where Britain could have a significant advantage. But we’re still waiting on the sites, we’re still waiting on the details. And so I think the criticism is not that the government isn’t doing many of the right things, but it’s not doing them well enough. And obviously, the situation in America with the Inflation Reduction Act just hammers home a key point, which is that the UK, like the rest of the world, is facing two major and almost simultaneous industrial revolutions. You have the AI industrial revolution and you have the clean energy industrial revolution, and the rules and terms of these are being set by the major power blocs, by the US, the EU and China. And if the UK is going to prosper in any of these, it’s got to be really fast, really thoughtful and really decisive. Got to be all the things that the government said it was going to be after Brexit, which it isn’t yet showing itself capable of being.

George Parker
Mmm. Now Jim, since David Cameron referred to “green crap” almost a decade ago, the Conservatives, including Boris Johnson, have had a pretty good record on the environment, haven’t they?

Jim Pickard
It has chopped and changed. I mean, as Robert was saying, the political certainty hasn’t really been there. And the irony of David Cameron, who famously tried to get planning permission and failed to put a wind turbine on his house in West London, yeah, he branded himself as a green Tory for years. And as soon as he got into government, he basically bottled it because he was worried about backbench Tory MPs and the Tory membership as well. And we’ve seen just in the last six months when Liz Truss was prime minister, she was pro-onshore wind, but she was setting out ideas to make it harder to put solar panels on agricultural land, you remember? And then when Rishi Sunak came along, he was kind of the other way round. He wants to make it harder to have onshore wind, and he only changed that after a backbench rebellion. It doesn’t project the message that these guys know precisely where they wanna be on all of these different technologies in the rollout. So the politics is a little bit uncertain. And I think the other point is the fiscal uncertainty where basically this government is a centre-right government and it looks across at what Joe Biden is doing in America and that is not really the style of Rishi Sunak when he’s trying to tighten public expenditure.

Robert Shrimsley
And there are a couple of lower-tech examples of where things are not going well. There was something called the Green Homes Grant, which the government pioneered and then it scrapped it. So I think we lost about £1.4bn worth of support for insulation and making homes more energy efficient. We hear a lot about electronic vehicles and getting the infrastructure in place for EVs, but it actually isn’t coming. I saw a stat that showed that there are more charging points in the London borough of Westminster than there are I think in Manchester and Birmingham put together. So it’s become a niche area, a niche mode of transport rather than the future. So it’s not that there isn’t a sort of general will for this, but they’re not following through with conviction.

George Parker
And the point you made in your column is that when things get tough financially, the instincts of previous Conservative governments, including David Cameron’s, is to row back on some of the green projects.

Robert Shrimsley
Yeah, that’s right. Look, there’s a generous answer you can put this, which is that actually a lot of money gets wasted. So a lot of the subsidies that Joe Biden will throw at industry in America, they will prove to be wasted. They will invest in technologies that don’t work. And what the government is trying to do is be smart. So they will look at things like carbon capture, use and storage. They will look at so-called green hydrogen or electrolysed hydrogen. They will look at other things like tidal and deep nuclear power and say, “Where can the UK be a leader? Let’s put our chips on those things”. But even this is taking too long.

Jim Pickard
Just to zone out for a second. Basically look at what is net zero and what is the government trying to do and how ambitious is it, and recall that when Theresa May signed up to this, it was in the dying weeks of her premiership. It was almost like she was grasping for some sort of legacy and went for this. People didn’t really know much about that. So to get to net zero, what you have to do is not only decarbonise the electricity system, which is already pretty far gone, you know, half of our electricity already comes from low-carbon sources, but electricity is only about a quarter of our total energy that we use. The other three quarters is the difficult bit on electricity, when this becomes so cheap that we probably will get there quite soon. But it’s the other three quarters. It’s when you look at transport, getting cars away from petrol and diesel and on to electric and getting households and offices and commercial buildings away from gas-fired power and onto electric power sources. That’s where the real cost comes in and a lot of that is kind of five, 10, 15 years away in terms of the government’s thinking. And there’s a reason why they pushed it that far away: it’s because it costs an awful lot. And that is where, unless the technology gets cheaper, it’s gonna be politically incredibly difficult.

George Parker
Jim, how much of this has got to come from the government, do you think? You wrote a piece this week about the environmental sector being worried we’re being left behind in a subsidy race with the US?

Jim Pickard
Yes. So basically what’s happened is Biden has moved with his Inflation Reduction Act and Europe is following suit. They’re talking about relaxing some state aid rules and maybe allowing more subsidy. And it feels a bit like Britain’s just caught between these two friendly Goliaths. And I went to Jeremy Hunt’s chancellor’s speech about a week ago, and I said, apart from whinging about protectionism, what precisely is the British government gonna do to counter this? And he didn’t really have an answer at this point. You know, they can talk about the fact that they already have subsidies for things like offshore wind and they’re going to roll them out to things like hydrogen and CCS. But it’s nothing like as generous as what the Americans are doing. And colleagues of ours in the industrial team talked to people from batteries, industry, hydrogen, CCS and loads of them were saying to our fellow reporters at the FT, “We’re really worried investment is already starting to seep out towards America and people are talking about shifting their investment”.

Robert Shrimsley
And the other small point on this is that the conservative position is that a significant proportion of the investment that needs to come for the green energy revolution should come from the private sector, very significant amounts as Labour is looking for less. But the longer you leave it, the harder you make it to get that investment. The more nervous industry is about investing, the more the state is going to end up funding.

George Parker
And it’s really interesting that Jeremy Hunt gave that speech that you went to, Jim, where he talked about the four E’s and he talked about education, enterprise, employment. And I thought, here comes the fourth one, environment. But of course, it wasn’t was it, it was everywhere. It’s rather, rather pathetic additions to the list of the levelling-up reference. But it’s fascinating, isn’t it, that the environment isn’t part of that sort of four-point plan that Jeremy Hunt’s putting forward, where it’s very much at the heart of what Labour’s proposing?

Jim Pickard
Yeah, and Boris Johnson actually made the green economy part of his future vision. He used it in speech after speech, as you know, what you stand for, where you want to take the country. He was a late convert to environmentalism in net zero, but when he embraced it, he fully embraced it. Rishi Sunak seems to still set three more of a kind of treasury lens about how much will this all cost and will it, you know, damage people’s household finances and that kind of thing. Whereas the Labour policy is very explicitly and I think this has not been particularly noticed by the public how ambitious Labour is on this. But they would borrow £28bn a year, they would use this to basically co-invest with the private sector in everything from offshore wind to some of these new technologies and also interestingly to get the nuclear programme off the ground. The nuclear programme has started and basically failed to do an awful lot over the last 15 years, even though Hinkley Point is being built, it’s massively late. All this talk about Sizewell finally getting approval; Sizewell’s miles off. Labour would do a much more interventionist approach.

George Parker
Now Robert, you’ve ploughed through Chris Skidmore’s epic critique of government policy, if you have to take out one or two things the government should be doing to get ahead of the game on the environment. What would they be?

Robert Shrimsley
I think it does come down to providing certainty about which technologies, which industries it’s backing and putting a longer-term funding structure around them. I mean, one of these principles says is if you’re doing annual funding rounds, the money is going to get spent over ten years. Why not give a ten-year funding round and give people that certainty which attracts private investment? But I think they should put a lot of effort into carbon capture, usage and storage. That’s undoubtedly one that’s coming and one where the UK has potential. They’ve absolutely, as Jim says, got to commit on nuclear. I think hydrogen is worth some effort because it is one that people put a lot of hope in. There’s an interesting area which is recycling critical minerals. So some of the rare earths. Almost all of these are processed and produced in China, partly because it’s such a dirty process that most Western countries won’t allow them environmentally. But there is a bit of an industry coming in Britain of recycling things like lithium. So I think those are the kind of areas. But I think it’s more about just providing that absolute certainty that says this is at the top of our economic agenda, it’s not a side issue. It’s at the top.

Jim Pickard
I mean, the one thing I would say about political certainty is that at least Britain, we know that all the major parties are committed to tackling climate change. If you’re about to shift your production to the US, there is the very real possibility that in a couple of years’ time a Donald Trump White House reverses some of the stuff . . .

George Parker
Right. Fair point.

Jim Pickard
 . . . You know, we’re a little bit more stable here.

Robert Shrimsley
You say that, Jim, but actually there is a very vocal caucus in the Conservative Party and in the wider conservative ecosystem. You know, the conservative pundits, people for all ages who are pushing very hard against net zero, it’s a minority view within the conservative parliamentary party at the moment. But it’s a growing view in that caucus, which has always exercised a substantial gravitational pull on the future direction of the party, which is why I also think it’s now where Rishi Sunak needs to get out ahead and lead.

Jim Pickard
And I’ve always thought that that could come to a head when we get past the colonisation of the electricity system and when we get on to trying to force people to buy electric pumps and force people to buy expensive electric cars, which is why I suspect it will not happen unless the prices of those things drop.

George Parker
On a related note, I guess, we had Shell’s bumper profits this week. Do you think there’s any chance of the government increasing the windfall tax on the energy companies?

Jim Pickard
So what I’ve always found interesting about the government’s approach to windfall taxes on the oil and gas industries is that we had a whole summer of ministers pretending it didn’t exist, and then it’s in regional incarnation, it was going to levy £28bn on the oil and gas sector. In November, Rishi Sunak increased it to about 55 billion quid, partly by increasing the level of it, partly by extending tax breaks to companies. And so the things they already have quite a big oil and gas windfall tax and actually probably bigger than the one that Labour was talking about months earlier. So when you hear these opposition politicians saying this windfall tax isn’t punitive enough, they are talking slightly with a forked tongue. But the one area where you could see the government reconsider is that the windfall tax does have an investment allowance for the oil and gas companies. And that’s something that Labour’s heavily criticised now. I wouldn’t be totally surprised if maybe in the budget Jeremy Hunt did have another look at that one.

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George Parker
Jim and Robert, thank you for joining us. And that’s it for this episode of Payne’s Politics. If you like the podcast, we’d recommend subscribing. You can find us through all the usual channels to receive episodes as soon as they’re released. And we also appreciate positive reviews and ratings.

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Payne’s Politics was presented by me, George Parker, and produced by Anna Dedhar and Manuela Saragosa. Sound engineer is Breen Turner. Until next time. Thanks for listening.

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