Winter Fuel Payment Cut
What a parcel of rogues in a nation!
David Browne
19 September 2024
Winter Fuel Payment.
The UK’s new Labour Government under PM Keir Starmer has announced that the annual Winter Fuel Payment introduced by the last Labour administration under Gordon Brown will be ended as a universal benefit. Where 11 million pensioners were previously eligible now the payment will be means tested for around 1.5 million.
As well as being downright disgraceful the move has been a massive political blunder for Labour. The party came to power with a big majority in the House of Commons but it is highly questionable that had anything to do with the plans they laid out in their election campaign. This was a policy of deliberately telling workers and their families there was practically nothing they could do to alleviate the austerity they have had to suffer for decades. But workers still voted Labour to get the Tories out albeit with the same enthusiasm shown in the number of votes for Starmer’s Labour, substantially less than that obtained by Corbyn’s Labour in the 2017 and 2019 elections. If Labour had any, “honeymoon period,” the public reaction to this signifies its death. The Tories have been thrown out, but the reality, which people suspected about Labour is now in place. Austerity, austerity, austerity, made worse by rich doners providing ostentatious bribes for cabinet members.
The initial attacks started immediately with an announcement that the two-child cap on child benefit would not be removed and Stormont went along with this.
Next up was the pensioner’s fuel payment cut. The reason given by Starmer’s chancellor Rachel Reeves on the day of the announcement was that a “black hole” had turned up when the Treasury books for the previous Tory government had been examined. The Tories it seems deliberately covered up a £22 billion overspend which they saw fit not to declare to make themselves look a bit less unelectable in the run up to the recent general election. However, this Labour claim is highly suspect, as they were fully briefed by the treasury.
Labour had already pledged in their manifesto not to raise income tax on the highest earners. Britain is still one of the wealthiest countries in the world yet Labour refuses to raise taxes on those who hold the wealth. This is because the Labour Party works to keep the status quo. Starmer has stated that his main aim is to make Britain the fastest growing economy in Europe with the same old neoliberal mantra that it is the success of business and the crushing of wage rates and services that makes a better society. Labour views not taxing the rich as sacrosanct yet they obviously don’t put such value on universal benefits that increase the cost of living for their traditional constituency, the working class.
So, the Labour government has decided to take away a universal benefit from pensioners who have budgeted for this in their household costs ever since it was introduced. Socialists should never entertain such an idea but then Labour abandoned socialism a long time ago.
Communities Minister Gordon Lyons of the DUP in a speech at the debate in the assembly tried to explain why the power sharing executive at Stormont had no choice but to give the go ahead to the cut saying that there was no choice in the matter but to stick to the letter of the 1998 Northern Ireland Act which says benefits in Northern Ireland must be paid at the same rate as the rest of the UK. Anything extra would have to come from the Block Grant. In his speech Lyons said:
“The estimated additional cost to the Block Grant of maintaining universal entitlement to a Winter Fuel Payment in Northern Ireland for Winter 2024/25 is £44.3 million and this does not even include any additional delivery or staffing costs.”
In addition, it is estimated that an appropriate IT system to deliver universal Winter Fuel Payments in Northern Ireland could cost between £5 million to £8 million for development and a further 20% of the development spend per annum for support and maintenance.”The Stormont assembly thinks they can get away with throwing up their hands and saying they can’t do a thing about it. Not one of them has said they agree with the measure. If this is so they should, as one, oppose it. The reason they all go along with it, is a shared ideology of sectarianism that prioritises the money promised to their patrons in each community. Meanwhile Michelle O’Neill (SF) and Emma Pengelly (DUP) tokenistically call for more money from Westminster. Futile gesturing of course. The sectarian division of money is always more important, to such an extent that the administration has no real budget and a largely fake programme for government produced only because it was a legal requirement.
Expecting the devolved government to defend pensioners against attacks on their income would be a bit much and that’s exactly what the trade unions and local left expect through their support for the Stormont administration. That is the least we should expect but the administration has already given in.
The fightback to defend pensioners will depend on the rejection of the current mixture of colonial rule and sectarian division that passes for government.