This Labour government was elected on a lie. Time and again, at the election Labour promised to look after pensioners, and had the nerve to suggest the Conservative Party would take the winter fuel allowance away from them.
Keir Starmer shamelessly put out a video about a pensioner who had told him that she didn’t get out of bed until midday as she couldn’t afford to put the heating, and that his Labour government would look after those pensioners.
Indeed, the Labour Party even published research which showed that scrapping winter fuel payments would kill 4000 pensioners. And yet, the very first thing that Rachel Reeves did as Chancellor was to scrap winter fuel payments for pensioners. Indeed, so speedily did she introduce the measure, it is difficult to imagine that this was not something planned before the election. Yet, they gave no indication at all during the election campaign that this was something they were considering. They have no democratic mandate for this act which will cynically take money away from 10 million pensioners, many of whom are struggling to get by.
Labour’s excuse for this betrayal and deceit was to say that the public finances are tight and there isn’t enough money to maintain winter fuel payments. They might have just about got away with that, but at the very same time as cutting winter fuel payments they announced massive pay rises for public sector workers – including already highly paid train drivers – at a cost which dwarfed that of winter fuel payments for pensioners.
How stupid does this Labour government think the voters are? This wasn’t a financial decision. This was a political choice. They decided to abandon pensioners because they think they don’t vote Labour, and decided to give the money instead to their trades union paymasters and cheerleaders.
It was pork barrel politics at its worst. Labour should be very cautious about over-estimating their popularity based on their huge Commons majority at the general election – after all they got far fewer votes than Labour got under Corbyn in both 2017 and 2019. Through this betrayal, they have ensured that nobody will ever believe any promises they ever make again. In fact they may as well not even publish a manifesto at the next election – it won’t be worth the paper it is written on.
