Should the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance be cut? For most people it’s a simple question, though most people’s opinion is of no account. For 404 Labour MPs, however, it is indeed of account. They get to vote on it.
Yet up to 50 are said to be struggling, with dozens being persuaded by their whips merely to abstain rather than vote against. What is the point? With a majority of 158, abstaining means yes. It is mere virtue signalling and a plea to the Lords to show more guts when they vote on the decision later this week. An abstaining MP’s conscience may be a little warmer, but the pensioners will be just as cold.
The withdrawal of the allowance is Treasury machismo. Given her failure to stand up to her most outrageous wasters, the chancellor Rachel Reeves’s £22bn “black hole” is mere rhetoric. The entire £1.3bn saved on the fuel allowance this year will barely cover eight weeks’ spending on the useless HS2 – spending that is set to continue for the next five years. Such misspending borders on the obscene.
So many of Keir Starmer’s apparently off-the-cuff decisions appear to have two aims. One is to show what a tough guy he is. The other is to blame the Tories for his having to be tough. Like VAT on school fees and a tax on non-doms, the decision about the winter fuel allowance was meant to be a leftwing move, to stop money going to rich pensioners. If so, the obvious solution was to postpone the cut to fold in with the next pensions rise, which Starmer claims will outstrip any reduction in winter fuel payments. Downing Street seems bereft of political advisers who can read the public’s reaction to these decisions.
The scale of tomorrow’s “rebellion” need not worry Starmer in the immediate term, but it will be an indication of the state of the road ahead. It will reveal a leftwing hardcore in his party, lying in wait for when things get difficult. Though George Galloway’s Workers party was an election damp squib, the Tories’ recent experience shows how a divisive faction on the extreme can devastate voting patterns.
Starmer cannot afford to forget that he is not Tony Blair in 1997. Starmer’s majority showed how far first-past-the-post can distort British elections. He won fewer actual Labour votes in winning than Jeremy Corbyn did in losing in 2019. At this point in Blair’s early term, the Labour government had 68% support. Starmer’s government has an approval rating of only 23% after a similar period of time in office. Another poll had Blair’s net approval rating at plus 65; Starmer is at minus 16.
Rubbishing the Tories and bashing a few of their shibboleths is wearing thin. Starmer needs to show he can stop wasting money and rescue prisons, hospitals, schools and care homes in ways that defied the Tory government. Given the storms ahead, he would surely be wise to restore a winter fuel payment that his government can clearly afford.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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