A key platform of Sir Kier Starmer's pre-election pitch was to 'bring back trust into politics'. Well trust is like virginity - when it's gone, it's gone. When in opposition in 2017 and there were rumours that the Tories might scrap the winter fuel allowance, Labour carried out an impact assessment which calculated that the policy could cause 3,850 deaths. Given that fuel prices have rocketed since 2917, at PMQs, last week, Rishi Sunak asked if the government had carried out it's own impact assessment before scrapping the winter fuel allowance, and would put the figure at a higher or lower number. If he was politically astute, he would have seen what's coming. Reeves and Rayner have changed their tune having said in 2019 'The Tories are the nasty party - they'll snatch the winter fuel allowance'.
Sir Keir dodged the impact assessment question, saying scrapping pensioners' fuel allowance was: "necessary to stabilise the economy and that the government was putting "mitigations" in place. Apart from the fact that scrapping the allowance will (allegedly) save £1.3Bn, the total welfare bill is £300Bn, a saving of just 0.4%, against a £9Bn inflation-busting no-strings pay rise for train drivers. I think basically, he's not politically astute enough to have realised the backlash there would be, and it's not even winter yet. The relatively small saving, which clearly came as much as a surprise to his own MPs, let alone the electorate will eclipse everything sense in the months ahead.
Even if we believe his repetitive '£22bn black hole about which they knew nothing' (which I don't), the hardship snatching the winter fuel allowance will cause to most pensioners is out of all proportion to the small saving. NHS spending in 2022/23 was
£181.7 billion. The vast majority of this (94.6%, or £171.8 billion) was on day-to-day items such as staff salaries and medicines. The money taken from pensioners won't go far to to fund pay awards (and NHS pension contributions) in the NHS or train drivers. I'm not saying the 5.5% NHS award was excessive, but it will add £9.5Bn to NHS pay.
Starmer says: 'pensioners will get a £460 a year rise next Spring'. Meanwhile, are they go go into a state of suspended animation?
For a start off
it's not true that all pensioners will get that amount and he knows it. Only those on the new State pension who retired at age 66 in 2016 will get that. Men born before April 6, 1951 or women born before April 6, 1953 will be on the old State pension.
Old basic state pension: Applies to those people who reached state pension age before April 6, 2016.
The
basic state pension is now £169.50 a week – or £8,814 a year.
These figures are for the full basic state pension. The actual amount you get depends on your national insurance record.
Some pensioners might also get more than this if they qualified for the additional state pension – also known as the state earnings-related pension scheme (Serps) and State Second Pension (S2P) – however this will depend on what they earned while working and whether or not they contracted out of it for a period of time.
New full state pension:
For those reaching state pension age on or after April 6, 2016: Men born on or after April 6, 1951 and women born on or after April 6, 1953.
The current
new full state pension is £221.20 a week – or £11,502.40 a year.
https://www.thetimes.com/money-mentor/pensions-retirement/state-pension/how-much-state-pension-will-i-get#:~:text=So, thanks to the triple,or £8,814 a year
Hence, pensioner over 74 - the oldest and most frail, will be on the old pension, of which there will be millions, many of who will have been manual workers some of whom were born before the war. Many manual workers didn't have occupational pensions. The average life expectancy of someone born in 1940 was 70.4 years, so on average they'd be lucky (if that's the word), to have had five years of retirement.
Over three million household are eligible for pensions credit, yet an estimated 800,000 don't claim it, and we're told by Starmer that the poorest pensioners only need to apply for pension credit and it's theirs on a plate. Well good luck with that. The online application form is 26 pages long, has 15 sections, and asks 243 questions.
First 15 questions are easy enough - name, D.O.B, N.I. number and address. Question 4 asks for all the other surnames or family names by which you've ben known - maiden name, married name, change of surname. Then a section of your partner and children, - is the child in prison or custody, pending trial or sentence? Do you or your partner have any money or investments? (If you have more than £10,000 see separate document about savings.) Are you in hospital as an in patient? And so on, for 243 questions.
The problem the government has - and they knew it before being elected, is that the antiquated pension system isn't able to 'means test' the winter fuel payment for pensioners. They haven't a clue how many are paupers or millionaires so you pay it to all or none. There will be many such as myself, with an occupational pension high enough that I would be excluded, but very many who are on the basic state pension living below the poverty line. There aren't that many millionaire pensioners - According to ONS data from June 2023, the top 1% of employees in the UK earn
£15,081 or more per month before tax. Annually, this figure is £180,972. (After tax, £90K).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/416102/average-annual-gross-pay-percentiles-united-kingdom/
Before the election, Starmer was upbeat about his 'fully costed, fully funded' wealth creating manifesto. (Sounds like BoJo's 'Oven Ready Brexit Deal'). As politicians are prone to do, he overpromised and now, he's just become a 'miserabilist' saying how awful things are, parroting '£22Bn black hole', and how there's worse to come and it's all the fault of the Tories. Nothing to inspire inward investment, rental properties are being sold in a rush to beat capital gains tax, and for middle income households, taxation will become a euphemism for confiscation, and high earners who can are taking flight.
No seeds of optimism, nothing to inspire anyone - evern his own MPs can see that.
In WW1, officers led their troops to the front in The Somme past other soldiers digging graves which would later be filled with many of those marching past. When Churchill gave his inspiration 'We'll fight them on the beaches' speech, every word was from Old English except one, which was French, and that word was 'surrender', prefixed by 'never'. How who 'D Day' have gone if all the officers had said "look guys - ain't it awful - you can see what we're up against - it's far worse than we could have imagined and it's going to get worse still'.
- The upshot is that for 14 years, Labour has been little more than an idealist protest group. 202 Labour MPs were newly elected in 2019, another 231 in 2024. Of the more experienced MP's its 14 years since they were in government.
His downfall won't be because of blowhard windbags like me, but from his own ranks.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56973/speech-now-is-the-winter-of-our-discontent
Oh well, keep the home fires burning!
It's being so cheerful that keeps me going.
David.
Duty Windbag.