Last week, the Labour Government may have won the vote to cut Winter Fuel Payments for ten million pensioners, but they have lost the argument.
Pensioners and families across the country are rightly up in arms at the Labour Government’s cruel decision to scrap Winter Fuel Payments for pensioners on an annual income of just £13,000.
The choice they have made will leave some of our most vulnerable in society having to chose between heating and eating this winter.
This is choice no one should ever have to make and yet the Prime Minister has admitted the Labour Government do not know how many pensioners will freeze this winter because they haven’t bothered to carry out an impact assessment on it first.
But if that wasn’t enough it its own, the scandal goes even deeper.
Rachel Reeves has propped up this cruel decision on the house of cards that is her fabricated economic narrative, and spurious claim that there is a black hole in the public finances.
And just 24 hours after Labour marched those of their MPs who could stomach toeing their party line through the parliamentary division lobbies to vote through their attack on pensioners, this house of cards collapsed right in front of our very eyes.
When her own officials in the Treasury are refusing to publish the details of this black hole because they aren’t sure of its accuracy then the Chancellor’s narrative cannot lie in anything but tatters.
And if this wasn’t enough to dispel Labour’s economic myths, the Chancellor was once again exposed this week when she was forced to admit that scrapping Winter Fuel Payments might not even save the Treasury a penny, with independent research finding that if everyone who is eligible to receive Pension Credit signs up to the benefit the scheme will in fact cost the exchequer money.
But, sadly none of this should come as a surprise.
The Labour Party have protected the Winter Fuel Payment in their last four manifestos. 2010. 2015. 2017 and 2019.
However, in the manifesto published this summer, any mention was absent.
This is no coincidence. Much like her plans for the tax rises hurtling down the track, this was planned all along.
10 years ago, in the House of Commons, Rachel Reeves argued that winter fuel payments should be means-tested and cut for many.
And finally, with the key to Number 11 now firmly in her hand, the Chancellor’s 10-year campaign has now come to fruition.
Rachel Reeves could have been honest about the planned Winter Fuel Payment cut in the election campaign, she could have at least given pensioners some time to prepare. Instead she failed to show the courage to level with Sunday Express readers about her plans.
Trust in politics, is of the upmost importance, and sadly, trust is what this Chancellor has lost.
But undeterred, she will now turn her focus to grabbing the cash she needs to fund her union paymaster appeasement plan – funding the billions she has handed out to the strike barons in repayment of their years of political donations to the Labour Party’s electoral war chests.
We know all too well that the Chancellor will be eyeing up tax rises she considers to be the acceptable casualties in her scorched earth economic campaign.
But, instead of laying the foundations for tax rises the British public can see right through, all her narrative does is scare off investment, deter competitiveness and kill growth.
This week Labour made the wrong decision. But they now have the chance to do the right thing ahead of this forthcoming budget.
They must take the opportunity in front of them to be honest with the British public and come clean on their plans, they should start talking up the British economy rather than talking it down, and they should reverse this disastrous Winter Fuel Payment cut which won’t raise any money and will leave pensioners on £13k cold this winter.
