LABOUR’S Shadow Attorney General Emily Thornberry has slammed the Conservative Party for refusing to call a general election.

She said: “What we would welcome is for the public to have a say in what should happen in relation to this crisis. How many prime ministers will we have had in just a few weeks, with the public having absolutely no say at all?

“And 70% of the public, according to polling, want to have that say, so why are the Conservatives not letting them? Why are they stitching it up amongst themselves?

“Why are they so arrogant as to believe that their so-called solutions are the solutions to the mess that they’ve created in the first place.”

Speaking in an interview during Breakfast with Rosie Wight and Stephen Dixon on GB News, she said: “The public want to have a say, and I’m sure you’ll tell me, ‘oh, well, you know, we’re in the middle of a crisis, we can’t afford to have six weeks of faffing around with an election’, but that’s how long it took for Liz Truss to come into office, mess up the whole of our economy and then disappear again. We could have had a general election then.

“With Boris Johnson leaving the contest now, they have now lost their very last argument for why it is that they shouldn’t have a General Election.

“I do dispute that we should even just kind of sit back and accept that there shouldn’t be an election. People supporting Boris Johnson said he’s the only person who we can have because otherwise we need to have a general election because he’s the only one with the democratic mandate.

“Well, for once, I agree with Conservative MPs, and that’s about a third of them so if we don’t get a general election, which we should, then obviously our job as the opposition is to make it clear that it doesn’t have to be this way. There is an alternative to this.”

She added: “We have short term solutions and long term plans for the economy, which quite frankly, have been where we have sat and we have listened to the public and we have learned from them and our policies are aligned with what it is that they need.

“So in the short term, we would have a windfall tax on the energy companies that are making such huge profits at the moment, because the prices are so high, we would then use that money to make sure that bills were kept low.

“The Government at the moment has got a policy where they’re going to keep the bills low for a bit but they’re not going to take any of the money away from the energy companies that are making so much money.

She said: “Remember, these are energy companies where the chief executives say that the current crisis is like a cash machine for them. So we would have proper taxes, we would make sure that this money was supporting the public, and then there wouldn’t be the billions of pounds of additional borrowing that this government is pushing us into.

“We would have long term plans for the future. We would make sure that we were investing in great British energy. We would make sure that we were moving towards clean power so that we weren’t subject to the whims of someone like Putin.

“We will be able to stand on our own two feet, we would have new jobs, we would be able to keep bills low and the profits that were made will be able to go back into British pockets.”