Cold as Ice: The cut to the winter fuel payment is hard to justify

Policy decisions are political choices. That applies to the Scottish Government as much as it does the Westminster one. And while we all absorb the repeated argument that there is little money and hard choices need to be made, the morality, never mind the optics, of one of the first acts of a newly elected Labour government to withdraw a small but important cash benefit from one of the most vulnerable groups in the country, just as energy prices rise and winter approaches, is a cut hard to justify. And only made worse when the disparity between the wealthiest and the poorest remains so achingly wide.

We have just ushered Labour into power with a huge majority on the premise of change after 14 years of Tory rule. And yet the question that hangs is whether Sir Keir Starmer’s approach to the welfare state diverges much from what came before.

And the differences are hard to find. No Labour government should be willing to accept the consequences of the two-child cap which inevitably pushes poor children into even more penury. Neither should any government with any kind of conscience have passed a policy so abhorrent that it required a ‘rape clause’ to recognise the fact that not all children are born into or out of some imagined Enid Blyton idyll. But the fact that it was a Tory government that first introduced such a heartless policy is now a moot point given it remains under a Labour one.

But equally, what reasonable government, never mind a left-leaning one, would be willing to risk a policy change that could lead to the elderly perishing of the cold? 

And you can argue all you like about who will still get the winter fuel payment, but the fact is, to save the Treasury just over £1 billion, 10 million relatively poor pensioners will suffer. And so, I would contend, will Labour.

One of the criticisms levelled at Starmer pre-election was that he needs to reveal more of his humanity, be less robotic, less emotionally detached, more empathetic. 

And now in power, he needs to govern less like an autocrat dictated to by the data on a financial balance sheet and more like a Labour leader with instincts rooted in the socialist values of what is right and what is wrong. 

Rather than being seen as a serious man with a serious job to do in sorting out the country’s finances, he needs to be seen to not just be making the tough decisions but making the right decisions. And taking away a cash benefit from pensioners who have contributed to the public coffers all their lives for a relatively small gain to the public purse isn’t just mean spirited, it looks politically clumsy and unnecessarily unjust.

Whether Labour needed to make this particular cut at this specific time remains to be seen but if I was Starmer, I would be praying for a mild winter, some quick wins, and a wish that my father had been a meteorologist rather than a maker of tools. 

And while the Scottish Government is right to criticise the Westminster government on winter fuel payments, its predictable outrage rings hollow in the context of its own spending cuts and the stinging criticism from those that know about the way it has managed its own funds. 

As a result, it will follow suit as regards the cold weather allowance and more. And while a motion, brought ignominiously for the Scottish Government, by the Conservatives last week, on the fact that the SNP will now no longer implement a manifesto pledge to extend the provision of a free school lunch to all, will have no legislative value, it is indicative that grand ambitions to tackle poverty don’t always match what happens on the ground.

Jenny Gilruth, the education secretary, was right to be “disappointed” that a government she is integral to has decided not to follow the principle of universalism that it promised when it comes to free school meals. Gilruth was a teacher and while she lamented in the chamber that “hungry children cannot learn”, at the same time, she will back a policy that can only contribute further to yet another failed promise by this SNP government, to close what they have prefixed as the ‘poverty-related’, attainment gap.

You don’t solve poverty by creating more poverty. But worse, and I think Labour’s Martin Whitfield hit the nail on the head when he said this wasn’t just a debate about public spending or free school meals or even universalism, this was about the political consequence of broken promises.

And that is something that runs deep.

It’s now eight years since Nicola Sturgeon tearfully promised Scotland’s care-experienced children that things would change and that they would be loved. But like so many other areas of public policy, the indications are that things have only got worse. And with more than one in 10 care-experienced children waiting as long as a decade to find a permanent home, they are right to question whether that is an outcome born out of love by their parent in proxy, or just from being let down.

Every day I walk past a bloke on crutches living in a tent pitched outside a homeless hostel in a city where a housing emergency has been called. This in a country where thousands of children are illegally living in unsuitable B&Bs. And in a Scotland led by a government that talks of enshrining the right to a home in an independent Scotland.

Tackling poverty should be the overriding mission of any politician and yet the disconnect, whether at Holyrood or Westminster, between the reality and the rhetoric could not be more stark.

There’s something very broken about Britain right now. An air of disrepair and decay, a lack of hope and a lethargy. A threadbare country where councils are going bankrupt and public services are being cut to the bone. And just when the country is crying out for change and there is a need to have a grown-up debate about the public finances and how we spend them, rather than just decrying the pot being too small and therefore the need to take from those that most need it, we don’t give serious thought to how we change the size of the pot.