‘Our country desperately needs a full and fair reset’

With Parliament in recess, the main political story is the election of the next Conservative Leader – and so our next Prime Minister. Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss seem to be trying to out-do each other promising billions of pounds of unfunded tax cuts.

Liz Truss’s latest policy is to cut the pay of public sector workers outside London – workers who were hailed as heroes during the pandemic just one year ago.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, a major crisis is brewing.

A constituent wrote to me last week about the cost of broadband: his bill will go up each year by 3% plus inflation – which means a double figure increase on what is surely now a basic utility, getting decent access to the internet.

Yet there remain far too many areas of Chester where residents get barely 10 mbps speed. And these aren’t just in the countryside. So where is that money going?

Well BT Chief Executive Philip Jansen received a 32% pay increase this year, taking his overall remuneration to £3.5 million. Yet he told his staff they can’t have a pay rise. So I do not blame BT staff for taking industrial action to fight for a pay rise.

It’s why I went to the BT Openreach depot on Bumper’s Lane this week to give my support to members of the Communications Workers’ Union fighting for a better pay rise in the face of this greedy boss.

And it is not just in telecoms. The oil companies are making record profits and ordinary people can’t afford to fill their cars up. The price of stamps has gone up but the privatised Royal Mail is still making bumper profits.

And the real squeeze will come this year in household energy costs. The cap will rise again with household gas and electricity bills in the thousands of pounds.

When I first stood for parliament in 2015, Labour proposed a plan to fix the broken electricity market, and it was denounced as ‘Marxist’ for intervening in a free market. Now we are living with the consequences of a failure to act in time.

Meanwhile foodbanks are running out of food because people can’t afford to donate and demand is sky high. We have even heard of hospitals running foodbanks to feed their staff.

If I sound angry about this, it is because I am. Britain isn’t working, too many things are going wrong, and the people at the very top are creaming it in while the rest of us see living standards fall. Our country desperately needs a full and fair reset.