The government should go further than it thinks in helping with energy bills

Former chancellor Alistair Darling has some advice from the 2008 financial crisis that may prove useful, writes Chris Stevenson

’You need something significant and substantial and you need it now, because people’s bills are going to start coming in in a few weeks’ time,’ said Alastair Darling (PA Archive)

The former Labour chancellor Alistair Darling has added his name to the chorus of voices calling upon the government to act quickly to avoid households having to face a “lethal cocktail” of inflation and possible recession.

Not all that unusual in the current climate, and Darling has been out of frontline politics for quite a while. However, the former frontbencher was chancellor while the country was dealing with the 2008 financial crisis – and there was one particular line in his interview with the BBC on Monday that caught my eye. Darling said that a lesson he learned from 2008 was that “you’ve got to do more than people expect and you’ve got to do it more quickly than people expect if it’s going to work”.

“You need something significant and substantial and you need it now, because people’s bills are going to start coming in in a few weeks’ time,” Darling told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “It needs bold action taken by the government now, not fiddling around with small measures that frankly won’t make any difference at all.”