"To make this assertion more credible, maybe he should have written it on the side of a bus.”
As Nigel Farage continues to push the widely debunked claim that Reform could save £225 billion by abandoning net zero policies, the British public appears unconvinced.
According to a new poll by Uplift UK, which advocates for a fair and rapid transition away from oil and gas, most voters reject Farage’s framing of the energy crisis. Instead, 55 percent of those surveyed believe that corporate profiteering is the main cause of rising energy bills, while just 20 percent blame net zero policies.
The survey also found broad support for the windfall tax on oil and gas company profits, including among Conservative voters.
These findings come amid growing scrutiny of the fossil fuel industry. Recent reports show that oil giant Shell paid virtually no tax on its North Sea operations in 2024, and actually received £12.4 million back from the government. While Shell paid £8.6 million to the Treasury last year, the tax relief it received for decommissioning and past overpayments left it £7.1 million in profit after tax.
Tessa Khan, executive director of the pressure group Uplift, said: “It is outrageous that Shell is once again paying no tax in the UK, when the rest of us are paying for its profiteering in unaffordable energy bills and the impacts of climate change.”
In January, it was revealed that Shell cut its investment in renewables last year, instead prioritising £18.7 billion in payouts to shareholders.
“It’s not as if Shell is investing its profits in projects that will lower energy costs,” said Khan. “It has dialled back its investment in renewables and is ploughing on with oil and gas projects, which will just lock us into high energy prices for years longer than is necessary.”
Khan also described Farage’s “anti-net zero crusade” as “out of step with the British public.” Farage has claimed that scrapping net zero would help fund Reform UK’s policy pledges, including ending the two-child benefit cap and reinstating the Winter Fuel Payment for pensioners.
“Most people don’t buy into Reform’s anti-Net Zero crusade — they know the real problem with high energy bills is our current dependence on oil and gas firms that put profit above all,” Khan said. “Politicians that are serious about tackling the UK’s high energy costs need to stand up to the oil and gas profiteers, not cave into their demands, and go faster in building more clean, homegrown energy. Reform’s attempts to disrupt this progress are a disservice to the nation and a slap in the face for the millions still struggling with unaffordable energy bills.”
Farage’s claims have also drawn ridicule. One former Treasury civil servant dismissed the £225 billion savings figure as entirely unrealistic, saying the UK government is spending “nothing on [the] scale” Farage suggests.
And in response to a piece in the iPaper on May 28, one reader mocked: “I read on your front page that Nigel Farage claims he could save £350bn over five years by scrapping net zero and slashing spending. To make this assertion more credible, maybe he should have written it on the side of a bus.”
“Nigel Farage the worker’s friend? No chance."
Nigel Farage, the millionaire privately educated former City banker, likes to portray himself as an ordinary ‘man of the people’, fighting for working communities up and down the country, and yet his voting record shows he’s the exact opposite.
Farage, who has made no secret of his desire to privatise the NHS and slash taxes that would benefit the wealthy, championing policies that would harm the interests of working people, has also been called out for his voting record.
The GMB Union, which has more than half a million members across all industrial sectors, hit out at Farage on its X account yesterday, highlighting how the Reform UK leader had consistently voted against policies that would help working people.
The union wrote on its X account: “Nigel Farage the worker’s friend? No chance.
-He voted against ending fire and rehire.
-He voted against sick pay from day 1.
-He wants to privatise the NHS.
-We see you.”
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
‘Attacking Trussonomics isn’t enough. We must attack Farage’s anti-migrant bile’
People notice that the Labour Party is rightly criticising Nigel Farage over his views on NHS privatisation, the climate, or “Trussonomics” – the focus of Keir Starmer’s speech today.
But the Prime Minister never seems to criticise what Farage says about migration. And when that is the main plank of the Reform agenda, that silence comes across as a tacit endorsement of those views – because what else explains the absence of criticism of Farage’s horrific anti-migrant rhetoric?
The Prime Minister told us that the UK risks becoming an ‘island of strangers’, a phrase eerily reminiscent of Enoch Powell, while launching an Immigration White Paper that seeks to create a more hostile environment for migrants.
Meanwhile, we continue to see daily news stories telling of Reform’s growing popularity, and a Labour government following in its coattails in the mistaken belief that this will calm the threat.
This is a difficult time to be a Labour member of colour
We are at a crossroads. We can continue down a rotten path – invoking “stranger danger”, giving legitimacy to the racist riots that only last summer saw fascists attempt to burn down hotels with residents trapped inside. Or, instead, we can choose to forge a new one.
READ MORE: Revealed: Labour’s financial woes as party unable to balance books this year
This is a difficult time to be a Labour Party member, and particularly so as a person of colour. We feel the shame of knowing that policies being progressed by the government we campaigned for, would have prevented us, our parents, and grandparents, from having come to this country if in place at the time of our arrival.
The hostile environment sends a message to all of us with a migrant background: we are not wanted. It is not tenable to, on the one hand say migrants make a vital contribution to this country, and on the other boast about the number of people you are expelling from it. The disconnect between those two positions speaks volumes.
It’s hard to believe Starmer’s speech was not borrowing from Powell
No. 10 has said that Keir Starmer did not consciously borrow from Enoch Powell. Yet, it’s hard to believe that the similarities are coincidental. Not only was the callback to “becoming strangers” reminiscent of Powell saying white people were being ‘made strangers in their own country’, but there is clear crossover in the speeches.
Powell spoke of people refusing to integrate, saying that many migrants ‘never conceived or intended such a thing.’ The Prime Minister said that people coming to the UK must ‘commit to integration and to learning our language’, casting all burden and fault onto individuals rather than the system politicians have devised.
As Zarah Sultana has rightly highlighted, it is impossible for it not to be a conscious callback. With the number of people involved in writing such a speech, at least one would have thought to check to ensure there was no similarity between it and the most infamous anti-immigration speech in our nation’s history.
But even beyond Powell comparisons, describing a period of relatively higher migration as a ‘squalid chapter’ is truly awful. It’s deeply concerning that the party’s strategists considered this in any way an acceptable speech to make. It raises serious questions around the judgement and values of those guiding the party’s leadership, suggesting not simply a misstep, but a deeply flawed strategic calculation.
Let’s learn from how Harold Wilson responded to Enoch Powell
Rather than copying them, there is another way of responding to the rise of the far right.
In 1968, following Powell’s speech, Harold Wilson condemned the Tory Party as a whole, identifying that the ‘virus of Powellism [had] taken so firm a hold at every level.’ He made a point to reiterate that ‘the struggle against racialism is a worldwide fight’, and that ours was ‘the party of human rights.’ Instead of kowtowing to Powell’s demands, Wilson passed the 1968 Race Relations Act, making racial discrimination illegal.
That Keir Starmer was a human rights lawyer is the second most well-known fact about the Prime Minister, behind his father’s occupation. Proclaiming proudly that ‘we are the party of human rights’ is something that Starmer could very capably do. There is a defence of the rights and dignity of all individuals that the Prime Minister could ably speak to. Yet when questioned recently, he gave a timid defence of the European Convention on Human Rights, and instead perversely linked it to being able to tackle so-called ‘illegal migration’.
What trust communities of colour had in the government looks to be collapsing following the ‘island of strangers’ speech. Better policy, rooted in anti-racism, dignity and respect for all people of colour, are needed now more than ever.
There has been misstep after misstep by the party on issues that particularly impact communities of colour, whether that’s mimicking Enoch Powell or saying Israel “had “the right” to withhold food and water in Gaza. These are problems – morally and electorally – that the Labour Party could easily have avoided.
We need to get on with reviving BAME Labour
That the party’s instincts on race and migration are so misguided speaks in part to whose voices are being listened to and who gets ignored. At the same time that the far-right sympathising ‘Blue Labour’ and ‘Red Wall Caucus’ are shouting from the rooftops, BAME Labour is still to be revived, seven years after being wound down, leaving BAME members no democratic vehicle to raise our voices.
Each year sees Labour shelves plans to revive a democratic BAME Labour, this year citing an “impossible” cost to let members meet. Rather than seeing BAME Labour’s self-organisation as a burden to fund, the party should recognise BAME members as a long-neglected but vital asset in the fight for anti-racism and community power.
The last General Election showed what the Labour Party can achieve with a message of hope. But it also revealed fractures in Labour’s vote, particularly with minority ethnic voters. Rebuilding trust with communities of colour will require more than optics. It demands policy rooted in dignity, justice and respect.
There is growing frustration and anger with the scapegoating, dog-whistles, and outright racial hostility that has become a mainstay of British politics. The party can no longer take our communities’ support for granted, nor can it rebuild the country without us.
Labour must reject punitive anti-migrant policies and instead commit to confronting racism in all its forms, advancing policies rooted in justice and compassion. Only then can we begin the process of rebuilding trust with communities of colour and lead with the moral clarity this moment demands.
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