Hell has officially frozen over ...

The Starmer government has actually done something welcome and confirmed that they really are going to U-turn on the dreadful decision to remove Winter Fuel payments from ten million pensioners.

This is above all a victory for the pensioners and voters who campaigned against the measure. Some politicians, including the Conservatives, who actively campaigned against Labour's winter fuel payment cuts can also claim some credit.











One person who can't claim credit is Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, because when we forced a vote in the House of Commons on Labour's cruel Winter Fuel Payments policy, Farage couldn't be bothered to turn up and vote. Anyone who has paid any attention to his attendance record in the European parliament will not be surprised by this. 


This belated U-turn from Labour is of course welcome, but in the meantime, millions of pensioners had to spend a winter without WFP support.

Some pensioners are wealthy and some are anything but. If the means-testing had been brought in as a taper rather than a cut-off and at a much higher level, Labour rhetoric about not paying the money to millionaires might have been justified.

But what they actually did, removing the entire payment from people who were even a pound a month over a pretty low threshold, hurt a lot of people who are light-years away from being wealthy or even comfortable. Let's not forget that when the Conservatives briefly considered - but never actually imposed - the same policy in 2017, Labour said it would cause 3,850 pensioners a year to freeze to death.

Let's hope this will be the first of many U-turns on dreadful Labour decisions.

  

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