Analysis

Labour cuts winter fuel allowance for pensioners who can’t afford to retire

Reeves and Starmer’s ‘change’ is more Tory austerity targeting the vulnerable

Right-wing Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves – notorious for once saying Labour was not the party for people on benefits and she’s only gone in the wrong direction since – announced on Monday that the Starmer government will end the winter fuel allowance, designed to prevent poor pensioners from freezing during cold weather, for any pensioners not on pension credit.

The announcement made a mockery of Reeves’s 2017 posturing – under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership when Labour actually stood for something positive – about the issue of winter fuel payments:

Pension credit is reserved for the very poorest pensioners – but huge numbers of pensioners who don’t qualify for pension credit are too poor to retire – and record numbers are forced to continue working after years of Tory cuts and corporate price-gouging, as research by the Office for National Statistics has shown::

Keir Starmer never met a promise he wouldn’t break – except those favouring Israel or keeping kids poor. Rachel Reeves never met a pointless, counter-productive cut she couldn’t love, even though Tory austerity has already been linked to more than 300,000 needless deaths. Red Tories indeed.

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19 comments

  1. What a complete bar steward Rachel Reeves is.

    I am 76 and still working part-time as I cannot afford to retire. My husband is 82 and has cancer. We now look forward to trying to meet our fuel bill next winter minus £550. I would like to string her up personally and shoot her with a machine gun. All this from a so-called LABOUR government!!!!

    Maybe they should consider booting out Zelensky and Netanyahu instead. But they like to finance death over life. More dead Ukrainians and Russians in eastern Europe; more dead Palestinians in the Middle East. Not forgetting the many many more avoidable deaths of pensioners here in Britain.

    1. Should tell all anyone needs to know, about Reeves and the rest of Thatcher’s creations; Iraqi BLOOD soaked Blair creature and its fan-things, SIR Keith Kid Starver Starmer
      🪱🪳🪰🪱🪳🪰🪱🪳🪰

      ONE RULE for them. ANOTHER for us.
      But the PIVOTAL tragedy is: even this VERY day you can read and hear a tragic many STILL blind and deaf by their own virtuous hopes. They find it incomprehensible that Keith Starver Reeves types KNOW what they do, CHOOSE to do what they do, and have not the slightest fear of McDonnell, Jeremy, RBL, Owen Joneses etc etc etc.

      Such are forever giving “warnings”… NOT to the electorate to be aware of Sir Horrific Nastiness Keith Starver & Co; but instead they are self-satisfied giving their “warnings” and ADVICE to the parasites to do this or that lest they come a cropper.

      That eagerness advise parasites, even THIS VERY DAY (eg Owen Jones), proves, to quote another poster, they have “not been paying attention”. Maybe the likes of Owen Jones today STILL believe as John McDonnell does, that he too can “CONVERT PEOPLE”.

      Scanned an article by Yasmin A Brown, some weeks ago, in which she WARNS Sir Keith that SHE IS “WATCHING” HIM.

      These people STILL unbelievably BELIEVE Sir Keith & Co give a toss about their “watching”, “warning” and ever so well read, educated and … oh so WISE advice.

      STILL, despite all their endless reading and giving speeches etc they FAIL to pay quality attention, learn and CHANGE

  2. Well, that took, less than, four weeks to kick us in the teeth.

    The Junior Doctors’ pay rise is welcome. I support that. Now prepare for the ‘divide and rule’, coming over the horizon.

    Keep an eye on the RMT and ASLEF Unions. Will pensioners get the same support, the Unions, have been given?

    n. b. The Dutch State Pension remains at 100.06% of the average national wage.

    1. The neoliberal Ursula von der Leyen (co-Davos-ist with Starmer, Reeves, Cooper, Streeting and Lammy, etc.,) and President of the European Commission since 2019 will soon ‘reform’ the Dutch State Pension George.

      Welfare’s meant to be directed at corporates, not people, they think.

  3. But, how could the poor woman have known? Our ‘impartial’ BBC would have us believe this.

    I’ve known for weeks and I’m just a non politically aligned pensioner. Formerly a Labour Party member.

  4. Didn’t they say that they were going to tax the rich? Robin Hood was the opposite of Robbing Starmer.

  5. Wondering how many months before folks flat out deny they voted for labour?

    1. Will that be the ones freezing their extremities off in blighty, or the ones who sodded off to warmer climes (allegedly)?

  6. Only 1 in 5 voted pretend-Labour at GE24 anyway nvla ,
    – and it’s claimed that between 15 – 20% of the total population is very malleable/acquiescent/obedient by nature…. so maybe not as many as you’d think.

  7. Will we still be getting our annual £10 Christmas bonus?

    Or will that remain as a replacement for the State Pension?

  8. “Rachel Reeves trolled the left in yesterday’s fiscal statement. She unveiled what is obviously going to be her new mantra. Her claim, repeated several times, was that “we can only do what we can afford”.

    I am quite sure Reeves knew very well that what she was saying was based on a claim made by Lord Keynes, the architect of post-war thinking, and the effective creator of post-war prosperity as a result. He said in a BBC broadcast in 1942 that “we can afford anything we can do”. Reeves’ new mantra is, of course, the exact opposite of what Keynes said.

    Is it likely that Reeves chose to so explicitly and so directly reject Keynes by chance? I don’t think so. I think it was absolutely deliberate. As I noted in The National last night:

    ‘Keynes wanted to empower the country by letting it do the best that was possible, knowing that this would generate enough wealth to pay for what was achieved. Reeves, in contrast, wants to use her role to belittle the country by denying it, and all of us, the chance to do those things of which we are capable.’

    One of these is a noble aspiration. The other is a dismal one. Reeves has made clear where she stands today. She has made the dismal choice.

    To again quote my article in The National:

    ‘She is a Chancellor in the Tory tradition of George Osborne, Philip Hammond and even Rishi Sunak. Just when the country most needed a new vision, she is going to offer us nothing of the sort.”

    Richard Murphy: https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2024/07/30/reeves-trolled-the-left-labour-of-old-and-keynes-as-she-set-out-her-desire-to-create-an-economic-nightmare/

    1. And on YouTube by Richard Murphy:

      Rachel Reeves could not have done worse than this

      1. Lift children out of poverty: Can’t afford it.

        Winter fuel allowance to pensioners: Cannot afford it.

        War in the Ukraine: £3.5 billion for, in the words of Keir Starmer, ‘as long as it takes’.

      2. Tony, as usual they have the wrong priorities. And you could not accuse them on having any empathy with us lot, Labour under Kid Starver equals profits before people at the cost to the people.

      3. Supporting the Neo-Nazi run 404 not just to the last Ukrainian but the last Briton.

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