Barry asked the Chief Secretary to the Treasury Chris Philp if, given the £60 billion borrowing for the government's energy guarantee is to be paid back by bill payers – not the oil and gas producers making record profits off the backs of the public's misery – he would consider raising the basic tax rate for producers. It's the lowest in the entire world and even raising it to the global average would raise £13.4 billion a year.
Predictably, Philp refused. This was soon after the climate minister Graham Stewart announced, in an Environmental Audit Committee in which Barry was sitting, a windfall tax on renewables – an outrageous move