Scotland’s first minister and the mayor of London have urged Liz Truss to freeze energy prices immediately, as part of a package of emergency measures to address the cost of living crisis. Nicola Sturgeon and Sadiq Khan said the incoming UK prime minister had to increase funding for public services and urgently increase financial support for those in greatest need. Mark Drakeford, the first minister of Wales, said: “We now need to work together, with urgency, to tackle the cost of living crisis, and save millions from hardship this winter. There is no more time to waste – action is needed now.”
In a gesture of goodwill to mark her narrower-than-expected Conservative leadership election victory, the three leaders, all from parties in opposition to the Tories at Westminster, pledged they would cooperate with Truss if she pursued the right policies. Sturgeon, who is expected to unveil emergency action on the cost of living crisis in her new legislative programme for Scotland on Tuesday, offered the new Conservative leader her qualified congratulations in a tweet. “Our political differences are deep, but I will seek to build a good working relationship with her as I did with last three PMs,” Sturgeon wrote. “She must now freeze energy bills for people and businesses, deliver more cash support, and increase funding for public services.””
Before her election, Truss was widely criticised after telling Tory members Sturgeon was an “attention seeker” who should be ignored. Truss later indicated she was referring to the first minister’s calls for a second Scottish independence vote, and insisted she also wanted constructive relations with Edinburgh. Truss had also attacked Drakeford during the leadership campaign, calling him a “low energy” Jeremy Corbyn. Speaking on the BBC News channel, Drakeford brushed that off, saying such jibes “do not matter to families throughout Wales who live in fear of what this winter might bring to them”. Michelle O’Neill, the Sinn Féin leader at Stormont and Northern Ireland’s first minister in waiting, urged Truss to drop her plans to appease unionists by rewriting the Northern Ireland protocol – a move that threatens to wreck the Good Friday agreement that introduced power sharing. During the leadership campaign, Truss suggested she would rewrite the protocol to placate the Democratic Unionist party, which has refused to rejoin the executive while the protocol remains in its present form. “We need a serious change of tack from Liz Truss and the British government,” O’Neill tweeted. “The Good Friday agreement must be honoured and assembly election result respected. People voted for real change, and as first minister designate my priority is to restore the executive to deliver change.” In an opinion article for the newspaper CityAM, Khan asked Truss to take a far more collaborative approach with the regions and nations than her predecessors, setting out a detailed list of interventions to combat the economic crisis. “What we desperately need now is a government that is laser-focused on the economy, on investing in our public services and on supporting households through this difficult period, rather than one that is intent on stoking crude culture wars or playing our cities, towns and regions off against each other for political gain,” Khan said. “In the short term, the new prime minister must take whatever steps necessary to ease the pressures on household budgets to ensure people can keep their heads above water.”