I am not yet eligible for the winter fuel allowance. Nor am I especially in favour of it, regarding it as one of those times when the government bribes the public with the public’s own money and expects gratitude for doing so. Like anyone who pays taxes, I rather resent a government of any stripe using my earnings to make themselves look good. I’d go so far as to say it irks me.
Still, I have watched Labour’s abolition of the scheme with something like awe. I know pensioners who appreciate the couple of hundred quid that the government lobs their way each winter. But last month the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, simply scrapped the universal winter fuel payment. Some ten million pensioners will no longer be receiving the cash.
What would have happened if a Conservative chancellor had scrapped the winter fuel allowance?
Yet it isn’t the decision itself which interests me so much as the response – or non-response – to it. Sure, there has been an online petition (and if Reeves cannot stand her ground against this then she might as well give up now). Otherwise there has been almost nothing.
All of which is intriguing, because I keep wondering what would have happened if a Conservative chancellor had made this decision. If the saving had been made by George Osborne, Sajid Javid or Rishi Sunak, I can say with considerable certainty that there would have been outrage. Much of the media would have claimed this was fresh evidence that the Conservative party’s policy platform included freezing the elderly to death. One of those crock left-wing campaign groups would have conjured up a figure of how many pensioners were likely to die this winter because of the cut, and the BBC would have run the story every night. A group of left-wing street movements would have organised protests – filled with the obligatory Socialist Workers party banners – alleging a cull of the population by the Tories. And so on. Yet the response seems to be that a policy that would have been genocidal in the hands of the Tories is mere economic sense in the hands of Labour.
I have mentioned before that I sometimes wonder if only a Labour government will be able to tackle the problem of illegal immigration because they are allowed to do things which no Conservative government is. As if on cue, last week the Home Office announced that it is planning a ‘large surge’ of return flights out of the UK for failed asylum seekers and others who have been found to have no right to be here. The levels that Yvette Cooper and co are currently aiming for would only return the UK to the still woeful performance of the Theresa May government in 2018. But it is a start.
Once again there has been a remarkably quiet response to this. The various ‘institutes’ and ‘observatories’ that claim to take an impartial interest in these matters have either nodded sagely or clapped quietly. For their part, Labour MPs seem to accept that Cooper is trying to mend a broken system and good luck to her. She has not yet been denounced as a white supremacist, a member of the KKK or ‘literally Hitler’. I would not expect the usual raft of ‘human rights’ groups to prevent the deportation flights from ever taking off or for Bad Samaritan members of the public to ‘save’ these poor migrants from said flights.
Yet I don’t need to imagine – because I can recall – what happened when people in a government which was nominally conservative said they would perform a similar task.
Had Priti Patel or Suella Braverman announced this policy, certain publications would have depicted her as a demented bull and their comment sections would have been wall-to-wall denunciations. Crank publications and radio hosts would have announced that Britain had officially gone full fascist. There would be protests in the streets (again with Socialist Workers party banners) and these would have attracted large numbers of people, from students who genuinely believed the Conservatives were ushering in a Fourth Reich to elderly political agitators who just love to make trouble.
I wonder what the next miracle will be? My money is on the NHS. Any political party that is in charge of the nation’s finances knows that the NHS is an unreformed money-pit. And while they have to lie about it a lot, and coax it and stroke it and flatter it, they also know that they cannot endlessly feed it. For want of other solutions, they tend to realise that some type of greater integration of private sector provisions into the NHS would enormously advantage patients.
The Conservatives have been extraordinarily loath to enable NHS reform because they know which political cudgel will be smacked against their heads the minute they do anything. The public may find it impossible to get a GP and almost impossible to book an appointment. But we are still fed the ‘envy of the world’ myth. For decades the Labour party has claimed that the Conservatives want to destroy or privatise the NHS (two things that are synonymous in their vocabulary). Again the campaigning left in the media and on the streets are ignited by this issue. Labour MPs and others enjoy nothing more than pretending that a Conservative government wishes to destroy the NHS. They will make this claim even while Matt Hancock (for instance) turns on a vast spigot of cash for the NHS and goes around wearing an ‘I heart the NHS’ badge.
I suspect that the Health Secretary Wes Streeting will be the next cabinet minister to benefit from this miraculous Labour immunity. When he inevitably announces some scheme for NHS patients to have access to private hospitals and practices to shorten waiting lists, just remember that he will not be planning to privatise the NHS. He will be saving it.
Lucky Rachel. Lucky Yvette. Lucky Wes.
Comments