Private meeting to allow MPs to speak their mind sees silence on issue of freezing to death 4,000+ pensioners
On Monday night, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves held a private meeting with the ‘parliamentary Labour party’ (PLP) in the Commons, a gathering of all Labour’s MPs to allow them to voice their concerns and intentions ahead of tomorrow’s Commons vote on the Starmer-Reeves plan to cut the Winter Fuel Allowance for millions of pensioners, forcing many to choose between heating and eating, or quite possibly to do neither.
Not one MP present spoke against the plan, according to one attendee.
The cut, according to Labour’s own calculations, will kill around 4,000 pensioners each winter – especially women, northerners and the over-75s – on top of the 8,000 people who already die because they live in a cold home.
Not one MP.
Those who care about starving children are no longer in the party, having been suspended because they refused to back Starmer’s decision to continue the ‘two-child benefit cap’ that puts well over a million children either into poverty or even deeper into poverty – a decision that earned him the deserved epithet of ‘Sir Kid Starver’. Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s enthusiasm for depriving pensioners of heat has made her ‘Rachel Freeze’ – and has not prevented her claiming thousands for the energy bills of her parliamentary second home.
Red Tories surrounded by more red Tories, every bit as wicked and cruel as the blue kind.
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Is it possible to get a list of attendees?
Their names need to be made public
Gibbon (in the commons) on CH4 news reported that: A labour MP had told him that “reeves was not giving a millimetre”
Which I thought was peculiar, seeing as the meeting was apparently still ongoing
Anyways, he then said something along the lines of the ones you’d expect to vote against would “most likely abstain” and that those who had voted against the 2-child benefit cap “would have their suspensions increased” of they defied this time.
Guru-Murthy (in the studio) explained that the chief mouthpiece against the cut – maskell -was unavailable for interview until the meeting had finished.
Maskell was on a few minutes later, but I didn’t get on what she said as I had other things to attend to.
But essentially, I’m not surprised nobody spoke out against it. And I won’t be surprised if those still with the whip do abstain, rather than vote against.
I’ve zero faith in any of them, anymore.
Not surprised **IF** nobody spoke out against it.
(Fixed)
…And that’s not me giving any benefit of the doubt about them ‘keeping their powder dry’. If reeves was said to have not given a millimetre then those with designs on voting against ought to have chanced their arm(s) and made it known there & then what they’d be doing.
They’ know full well they’d be getting the whip withdrawn once the vote was taken anyway – may as well have copped it a day or two earlier, for what it’d be worth.
But I’m with gibbons on this. Those that say they’re against will shit out and abstain. Those dissenters still under the whip showed what they’re about, last time.
As you have observed elsewhere, Toffee, so called ‘Labour” MP’s are not the only ones who have fell silent on the war the Starmer Junta has begun waging on those they consider to be deplorables – who they arrogantly dismiss as “populists”.
Why the hell pick on pensioners and children to bear such a burden? Where are the cheerleaders, wannabe trolls, and gaslighters who spent so much time crowing before the election? Seems they have crawled back under their stone now that the damage they have enthusiastically denied will ever happen is being made manifest.
As Richard Murphy notes….
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2024/09/10/why-is-labour-picking-on-pensioners/
….”It’s the weirdest political strategy of all time to choose to be unpopular by picking on the vulnerable in society.”
”It’s the weirdest political strategy of all time to choose to be unpopular by picking on the vulnerable in society.”
Not necessarily. They’re only eleven weeks in to a five year term.
There’s all that remaining time for smarmerist labour to re-implement the toerag austerity measures that even the toerags got shut of – AND impose more because they’re worse than bastard useless – before they hand back the reins to the first XI
…Who will (like they did when challenged about the proliferation of food banks), tell us that smarmerists introduced those measures, whereas they – the toerags – will be directing more people towards them , instead of doing a fucking dicky-bird to alleviate the issue, thereby making food banks the new welfare state.
The pinnacle of camoron’s big society
Don’t be surprised to see this within the next 6-7 years.
https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/will-work-food-depressed-man-dirty-wear-sitting-stairs-holding-poster-33261320.jpg
But at least wee stevie gobshite’s daughter might have a better future. 🙁
Britian: The Poster Boy for the Collective West:
Plenty of money to arm Neo-Nazis in 404 and wage war.
Paid for by freezing pensioners to death and making children go hungry.
Courtesy of Sir Kid Starver, Wes Screeching, Wrecker Reeves and all the other useless lobby fodder cowardly Members of Parliament more concerned with looking out for their lucrative careers.
The Western Policitical Class is the biggest criminal enterprise on the planet. Led by the elites and establishment of Perfidious Albion.
Diane Abbot has been speaking out on the issue. Was she at the meeting?
Maskell spoke out against the abolition of the heating allowance on one of the News programs last week I think? It might have been
GMB ..
There will be no excuse for Starmer-type retribution on MPs voting against it
or abstaining – this has come completely out of the blue; it was
not in the Manifesto or signified in any way. No discussion during
the Election Campaign – Nothing ..
PS I think the MPs suspended for voting against 2 child cap not be eligible to attend
the PLP meeting?
Abbot’s a signatory to the EDM.
https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/62441/social-fund-winter-fuel-payment-regulations-2024
Therefore, I expect her – along with every one of the other labour signatories – NOT to commit the smarmerite shithouse trick of abstention, but to oppose the bill.
AND….QUELLE BASTARD SUR-PREEZE…
The chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Ageing and Older People says she will be abstaining in today’s vote on withdrawing winter fuel payments.
Rachael Maskell, a Labour MP, says she “wants to work with her party to find the mitigation necessary to keep the cold from older people” and is calling for a delay of the regulation.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme if the cut begins as proposed this autumn, measures to mitigate the impact on the elderly and consequently the NHS will be necessary.
Gutless invertebrate. But she won’t be the only one.
And what, pray, are the practical steps to mitigate this – along with sending starving children to food banks before school starts a nine in the morning – going to be?
Has anyone responsible for these criminal decisions got a sodding clue as to how you “mitigate” in such dire circumstances?
Perhaps a “free” smart meter for every Pensioner to help manage their meagre resources?
Or maybe free membership of exercise classes at the local sports centre or gym to help them keep warm?
Mayhap they could provide a free ‘Big Slipper” to every pensioner? I’m sure those who coined it in supplying substandard shite during Covid wouldn’t charge the Government more than three to five billion pounds.
Doubtless, a free air ticket to Billy No Mate’s alleged Caribbean bolthole for the winter would not go amiss? I’m sure he’d welcome the company wherever his gaffe happens to be?
Of course, you could always kill three birds with one stone by sending all the pensioners and kids on a jolly eastwards rather than westwards. Country 404, having got through most of its pensioners in the meat grinder, is currently press ganging what remains of its population to send to the recently reopened Eastern Front which temporarily closed down in 1945.
It would welcome some new canon fodder from the Collective Worst in lieu of more non-existent wonder weapons which don’t work which the North Atlantic Terrorist Organisation have run out of because our clueless elite and their cheerleader shills jettisoned a manufacturing industrial economy in favour of a parasitic financialised one.
That way you keep the War racket going on a bit longer for the shareholders of Rasytheon, Blacrock et al; you save money on future pensions, unemployment and other social security payments into the future – along with NHS and education savings; and you get rid of a shed load of “populist” deplorables who are cluttering up the streets using up the 0.1%’s dwindling resources.
Someone should pitch this to the useless eater Oligarch class’s political and media Minder’s just to test how far down the malice in blunderland rabbit hole they have really gone.
“And what, pray, are the practical steps to mitigate this….”
If memory serves, Starmer was muttering about increasing take up of Pension Credit. Again if memory serves, there are apparently 800,000 pensioners who are eligible but who have not applied. If this figure is available, it would surely not be beyond some computer programmer to identify them and making it possible for them to be contacted and assisted in applying.
But then if that happened there would be no savings! So I don’t suppose there will be anything done on that score any time soon…
I have had no faith in Starmer from almost the very day of his election to leadership of the Labour Party. However, apart from the utter shamefulness of this act only weeks into his government, I am absolutely staggered by the total ineptitude of Starmer/Reeves/Reynolds in dealing with the issue and subsequent outcry.
And still no defence from the resident gobshite who insisted we were enabling toerags if we DIDN’T vote smarmerist labour.
Freezing pensioners and starving children…These what you call toerag enablement are they, gobshite?
I expect little more from the vast majority of NU Labour MPs, who are little more than self-serving, quisling bastards.
The answer is in our own hands.
Get out there and ensure the future defeat of those who betray us.
Just seen keef on the news at the tuc..
“It’s working people who pay the price and I’ll never let that happen”
(Report cut off before the sparse applause he doubtlessly got)
Really, keef?
Really?? Not the HARDworking people?
Lying twunt. Just GTF.
**PS** apparently someone shouted ‘tax the rich’ when keef was drawling on.
Doubtlessly, he ignored that.
I think I shall bloody scream if I hear Starmer say ‘working families’ one more time. So the millions of those unemployed for any reason (many of whom will be carers given the parlous state of the care sector at present), elderly and sick and disabled, and all their children, don’t “pay the price”?
As I’ve said above, I have never had any great hopes for Starmer’s Labour but apart from this shameful behaviour only weeks into a Labour government, I am staggered at the total ineptitude and terrible optics over the WFP issue. No political nous whatsoever. And, of course, no dissent allowed amongst Labour MPs….
For the 1%
A Government of the 1%, for the 1%.
Starmer: For the Few, not the many.
Do we really expect him to be an upstanding, honest compassionate human being???? Absolutely not!!!! He is torythrough and through.
Wonder how many affected pensioners look after their grandkids while the parents go out to earn enough to qualify for a foodbank referral?
No doubt the knobheads will squeal:“but we’re gonna give those parents 30 hours free childcare”
Yeah. Of course you are…WHEN AND IF you can get the staff – and that’s IF there’ll be enough nurseries by then.
Which won’t be for another few years…NOT instantly. IF at all. And even then that’ll only apply to pre-school toddlers…Today’s unborn – even today’s unconcerned.
So it’s a triple-whammy for them families.
I fucking despise this lot even more than the toerags.
Today’s unconceived**
(Not ‘unconcerned’)