Blog:Robbing the Elderly
From Bolton Interweb
del.icio.usBen Debusse, Budget Correspondent, 26 March 2011
On Page 26 of the Lib-Con Coalition Agreement that is supposed to lay out the principles of government policy it states quite clearly “We will protect key benefits for older people such as the winter fuel allowance, free TV licences, free bus travel, and free eye tests and prescriptions.”
Yet in the Budget this week, in the mass of accompanying paperwork not the speech to Parliament, the Government are reducing the Winter Fuel Allowance for single pensioners by £50, and for married couples by £100. When this was picked up by the media the most feeble excuse I can imagine was trotted out. This is not a reduction, the £50/£100 was a temporary top-up and that is what is being stopped, not the allowance itself. Temporary? It’s been going for 3 years.
What a load of baloney. Fuel prices haven’t plummeted, the last two winters have seen Britain snowed in for weeks, and pensions haven’t been massively increased to cover the loss. I doubt you would find anyone outside the Treasury and DWP who honestly thought the promises made in manifestos and the Coalition Agreement only applied to the rate of Winter Fuel Allowance that applied in 2007-08.
This is playing with small print that wasn’t even there, reinterpreting words that everyone thought was clear and understood. It won’t wash with the public, it shouldn’t wash with MPs. If this was a commercial rather than political contract no court would ever uphold it. If they can reinterpret protecting the Winter Fuel Allowance then what else in the list of promises can be fiddled with. Worse still, to hide this reduction in background papers and not to mention it in the Budget speech makes you wonder whether there was a hope that it would remain hidden until too late to reverse it. A bit of a foolish and politically naïve hope and similar attempts to bury bad news in this way have destroyed the career of more than one minister in the past. Being caught hiding things like this ends up being 100 times worse than being upfront about it.
Clearly Deputy PM Clegg was unaware of the shenanigans hidden in the budget documentation as he blustered against Labour accusations of cuts to the allowance, accusing them of shamelessly making things up. When Labour were proved right Clegg had an opportunity to draw a line, say this was clearly a mistake he wasn’t signed up to, and would be voting against should the error not be corrected. It would have shown that the Lib Dems are not junior partners to be walked all over and are willing to stand by their principles. At a time when the Lib Dems are in desperate straits with the electorate taking a stand would have a tremendous positive boost. Instead he seems to want to “clarify”, i.e. back down and look like a puppet of his Tory masters.
I voted Lib Dem because I did not want unfettered right wing power to dismantle social welfare. I supported the Lib-Con Coalition because I believed the Lib Dems would apply a break to Tory extremism whilst supporting economic sense that Labour seemed to have abandoned. For the first time since last May I am wavering. If the Lib Dems roll over and accept this particular cut, go along with the crap about the temporary increase being scrapped and that is OK, don’t enforce the spirit, and actually the letter as it happens, of their Coalition Agreement, then all trust I might have in them will evaporate. And then who do I vote for. It is a bit foolish for the Tory party too, far more dependent on the grey vote than other parties, to be robbing their own electorate of £50-£100 just ahead of local elections.
That is not to say that the Winter Fuel Allowance is perfect. It isn’t. It is paid to all over-60’s regardless of need. So working 61 year old men earning £100k a year get it, the Queen is entitled, Vince Cable and Ken Clarke get send a cheque. Reform it so it goes to those who actually need it, but don’t reduce it and put millions of poorer pensioners at risk not only of freezing next winter, but all the stress between now and then of worrying about freezing next winter. It is frankly unforgivable, and if it is not a stupid mistake by a small band of nutcase right wing mavericks who sneaked it in without their leaders noticing, then the caring sharing image that Cameron’s Conservative party is trying to portray is false and they are still the mean-spirited nasty party that many of us had suspicions might lay under the veneer. That once put them in the political wilderness for 13 years and can do so again. Cameron needs to quickly stamp on this if he is not to repeat Gordon Brown’s highly embarrassing scrapping of the 10p tax band debacle that undermined his premiership and from which he never recovered.
First major blunder by the Coalition, first legitimate blood to Labour.
© Evrose, 2011
