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Mmmm. That went well, didn’t it? One of the first things Labour did after winning the election was to cut the winter fuel allowance (WFA) for most pensioners. To show that they were strong. A signal to the bond markets that they would take the tough decisions to balance the Treasury books.
And it was just one of those things if a handful of old people decided to die of hypothermia. They were dying in a good cause. Pour encourager les autres. Let no one take being warm for granted again. Time for some proper pensioner gratitude.
After that, things started to unravel. MPs on all sides of the house – not least the Labour benches – began to ask whether this was the sort of policy a Labour government, any government come to think of it, ought to be introducing.
Hell, the Tories had tried starving them with a cost of living crisis and now this? Rachel Reeves unconvincingly said the real aim was to make sure all those eligible for pension credit had claimed it but there would be no U-turns.
Then came the U-turn. Two and a half weeks ago at prime minister’s questions, Keir Starmer announced the reverse ferret. Something that everyone other than Kemi Badenoch heard clearly. Kemi isn’t the quickest on the uptake.
Now, on Monday morning – a couple of days before the spending review – came the details from the Treasury. Any pensioner with an income of under £35,000 would now be entitled to the WFA, starting this winter.
Genius. It would be hard to create a bigger cock-up if you tried. Not just the denials of the U-turn followed by the inevitable U-turn. But the logistics. With the extra 100,000 people claiming pensioner credit, Labour has ended up with a bigger spending bill than if it had left the WFA as it was.
Plus it has managed to dent its own economic credibility by not being able to explain how the £1.3bn extra cost will be paid for. Wait until the budget, we are told. Only just a few weeks ago, Reeves said she would live or die by balancing the books.
The chancellor was out and about in north London trying to smooth things over on Monday lunchtime. When is a U-turn not a U-turn? When it’s a Rachel U-turn. It was like this. She had originally made the spending cut to partially fill the black hole in the country’s finances. Just one of those things.
But then she had miraculously found that the economy was doing far better than expected so she was able to reverse her decision. She couldn’t say how the country was doing better – she has yet to find anyone to back up this suggestion – but we should take her word for it.
Any connection to the withdrawal of the WFA being unpopular was a coincidence. She was sorry but not sorry. Yeahbutnobutyeahbutno. Everywhere she went, lay the telltale sounds of burnt rubber.
You could tell that Rachel wasn’t having one of her best days. She looked confused. Embarrassed even. As if she couldn’t quite believe some of the nonsense coming out of her mouth. A feeling confirmed by the fact she was nowhere to be seen when it was time for her to make a statement to the Commons. She had just checked her diary and had found there was a flurry of subsequent engagements.
Nor was anyone else senior in the Treasury to be found to take her place. They too had found themselves unavoidably detained elsewhere. Appointments at the doctor. Unexpected open heart surgery. Anything. Any excuse will do. “I’ve got a very important lunch. I can’t cancel.” “But the statement isn’t until 4.15.” “Ah, but it’s a very long lunch. And then I have a coffee.”
What goes around, comes around. In his time as head of the Resolution Foundation, Torsten Bell would have had a thing or two to say about the cuts to the WFA. None of them good. There was a Torsten once who didn’t think killing pensioners was a good idea. But that Torsten was very much last year’s Torsten. He has moved on since then. Wised up.
But when he became a fresh-faced MP last year – Torsten looks about 12 – he was immediately promoted to the most junior role in the Treasury. One step up from the receptionist. So there was an air of inevitability when he was forced to take Rachel’s place.
Luckily, Torsten is hopelessly naive. Thinks there is an air of nobility in being made to look a halfwit. It’s as if he was yet another ego straight out of Oxford who believes that he was born to rule. That the union was just a stepping stone to a life that will probably end up in the House of Lords. Monday was just a staging post.
It’s a brilliance that was almost entirely self-imagined. He managed to turn what was always going to be an embarrassment into a humiliation. All ersatz macho posture as he tried to pretend the U-turn was a clever piece of government time management.
Hell, he even managed to make the shadow secretary of state for work and pensions, Helen Whately, look good. Something that never happens. She was prone to her own delusions – namely that it was the Tories that had forced the U-turn – but her main point was unarguable. Why no apology? Just say sorry. You’ve fucked things up, you’re trying to fix it, let’s move on. The story might then go away. But Torsten didn’t apologise. Choosing instead to bluster for more than an hour. The kindest thing to do was to look away.
Down in Port Talbot, Nigel Farage was also trying to take the credit for the U-turn. Though he was also trying to make it sound completely normal for someone to walk out of their job one day and walk back in the next. Zia Yusuf must be thrilled to be talked of as a temperamental teenager who had got cross with Daddy. Nige also observed that Yusuf had suffered loads of racist abuse. He forgot to mention that almost all of it had come from Reform UK supporters.
Mostly, though, Farage was keen to reopen the steelworks that can’t be opened to make a type of steel we don’t use and to reopen the coalmines so that all those former miners who swore blind they wanted their kids to never go down the pits could tell their kids to do just that. The regeneration of Wales starts in the 1950s. Vote Reform. Back to the future.
