SHADOW Chancellor Sir Mel Stride has said that there is a “pressing need” for the Strait of Hormuz to be opened and the government should respond positively to President Trump’s call for assistance.
He told GB News: “We certainly have a pressing need to get the strait open. There’s no doubt about that. Twenty per cent of our oil and gas going through there, and the impact, obviously it’s having on prices, energy prices, and the inflationary effect that that will have in our own economy, particularly if the war continues for some considerable period of time.
“In terms of the movement of specific assets, ships, etc, as a member of the opposition, I’m not really in a position to be able to comment in detail, given that we don’t have access to the kind of intelligence and information that the government will have.
“But I make an overriding point, which is we’ve got to step up to the plate on this one.
“And the government was very slow off the mark at the beginning, not allowing access to UK bases, to the United States, which incidentally, of course, is the position we’ve ended up in, albeit that the relationship with the Americans has soured considerably in the meantime.
“So when it comes to these latest requests from the President, I think they have seen in the context, I’m afraid, the flat footedness of this government and the fact that they’ve already damaged that special relationship with our most important ally.”
On the government providing support to consumers, he said: “It’s certainly necessary for those who are heating their homes only with oil, because they’re already seeing a huge increase in costs at the moment. But more broadly, on support packages, the key things here, I think, are two-fold.
“Firstly, that they are appropriately targeted. You need to get the support to the people that really need it, because when you do these things at scale, they’re massively expensive. But the second thing is, you have to ask questions about are , are the public finances in a position such that it’s possible to provide large scale support now?
“We last did this back in 2022. Tthe economy, in terms of the size of our debt and our fiscal capacity to do these things, was in a much, much better position than it is now.
“So my view is that the way that this economy has been mismanaged by the government is actually going to be making it much harder to step in at scale and support people through this difficult time.”
