Budget Resolutions

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

Monday 1st December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Your Party)]

The cost of living crisis is not a natural disaster. My constituents are not struggling because of so-called global pressures; they are struggling because an economic system built by the powerful and for the powerful is bleeding them dry. Yet this Labour Budget refuses to confront that truth. Instead, it protects profiteers while punishing those who keep this country running. Water companies siphon off billions in dividends while pumping sewage into our rivers, energy giants rake in record profits while families in Coventry South are terrified to turn on the heating, and rail and bus companies charge extortionate fares for failing services. This is extraction. It is privatisation functioning as intended, with wealth flowing up and misery pushed down.

And extraction does not stop at corporations. The people who run this country want us to believe that every refugee is a rapist, while they grab £12 million of taxpayers’ money to protect a parasite called Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. He has never seen the inside of a cell or a courtroom, because what matters to the ruling class is not the safety of women and children; it is the peace and pleasure of the powerful.

What a sick society we live in when the political and media class bends over backwards to defend the royal family, including Andrew, who was close friends with the notorious paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. That is our money that provided him with housing, our money that defended him in court, and our money that put food on his table. We should not just abolish Andrew’s titles; we should abolish the monarchy itself.

It is an absolute scandal that the wealthy glide through this Budget untouched. Everyone except the richest 10% will feel the brunt. This is happening in a country where billionaire wealth has exploded beyond imagination. In 1990, Britain had 15 billionaires; today we have 156. The richest 350 families now hold more wealth than the entire economic output of Belgium. Make no mistake: this is not an accident; it is the direct result of political decisions by political parties that are too captured to challenge the super-rich.

Now this Labour Government expect applause for ending the two-child benefit cap, but let us be clear: it will take effect in April 2026, not immediately. They have knowingly left hundreds of thousands of children in preventable poverty for over a year and a half, and I am proud to have lost the Labour Whip for standing up and voting to scrap this cruel policy last July. Some of us do not need focus groups to know that punishing children is wrong.

Under this Labour Government, disabled people have seen their benefits slashed, and pensioners have been stripped of winter fuel payments. Food bank use has hit record levels, and this Government plan to funnel an extra £11 billion a year to arms companies. That is money flowing into the pockets of shareholders for the merchants of death, after two years in which our money has funded daily spy flights over the ruins of Gaza, aiding and abetting a genocide. This Labour Government are just as happy to oppress at home as they are abroad.

We cannot ignore the political damage of this extreme inequality. History teaches us a stark lesson: when inequality runs rampant and the super-rich hoard more wealth, the doors open to something dangerous. We have seen the poison of fascism return to our streets and screens, and what do we hear from this Government? Well, when the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) says, “Kick an immigrant,” the Prime Minister asks, “How hard?” and shamefully uses the same fascistic language as Enoch Powell by calling us an “island of strangers.” We are not an island of strangers; we are an island that is suffering from a Government who protect the privileged and punish the vulnerable.

Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 22nd January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab)]

In my four years as a Member of Parliament, I keep coming back to this question: whose interests does this place serve? Do the laws we pass and the structures we maintain serve the interests of our constituents? Are they designed to enrich and empower them? Or do they deepen inequalities in wealth and power, serving the interests of the super-rich and the companies that dominate our economy? I say that because with this Bill, the question feels more relevant than ever.

The Bill, which scales-up fossil fuel extraction in the North sea just as we should be rapidly scaling it down, is obviously not about helping our constituents. It is not about bringing down energy bills—even the Secretary of State admitted that—and it is not about energy security. A former BP boss said that new North sea drilling is:

“not going to make any difference”

to energy security. That is no surprise, since fossil fuel companies are given ownership of what they extract and then sell it on the world market. The Bill is the very opposite of tackling the climate crisis. That is a blatant truth recognised by the Government’s own Climate Change Committee, which said the Bill is not in line with net zero.

If the Bill is not about energy bills, energy security or tackling the climate crisis, what is it about? The answer is simple. It is about maximising profit for fossil fuel giants, guaranteeing that they can extract every last bit of oil and gas, no matter the consequence for people and planet. These companies are the last that need our support. As energy bills soared last year—our constituents know that reality far too well—BP’s global profits hit £23 billion. Shell reported its highest ever profits: a whopping £32 billion. This year, the world’s five biggest oil companies are expected to hand investors more than £80 billion. Record bills for my Coventry South constituents have meant record profits for fossil fuel giants.

Eye-watering North sea oil and gas profits are not an accident, but by design. They are aided and abetted by Government choices. The Government’s North sea tax and subsidy regime is so skewed in the interests of fossil fuel companies that for years Shell and BP got away with paying zero tax on North sea production. It is so rigged in these companies’ interests that the company developing the Rosebank oil field will get a £3 billion tax break to develop the site, meaning our constituents will pay 91% of the cost of developing it. The public pays the costs, the company creams off the profits and then we all face the consequence of its climate-wrecking activity. And there is no doubt about that, because the science is clear: developing new oil and gas fields is incompatible with our climate commitments.

More oil and gas extraction may be good for fossil fuel companies and their shareholders, but it spells disaster for the rest of us. If we continue to let the climate crisis deteriorate, we condemn our constituents to a world where extreme weather patterns become more common and more severe; where there are more Storm Henks and more Storm Ishas, and where their winds blow harder and their floods get deeper. We condemn young people across the country to a world where droughts destroy crops and food systems break down, where sea levels rise and millions are displaced.

That is the world that this climate-wrecking Bill is helping to create, but there is an alternative. It is called the green new deal. It is a programme of state-led investment in green industries, rapidly replacing fossil fuels with renewables, creating millions of good unionised green jobs, taxing the richest, and redistributing wealth and power in favour of ordinary people. Unlike the Bill, it is a plan that puts people and planet before profit. There is no time to waste. I urge colleagues to vote against this climate-wrecking Bill and build that brighter alternative.