This as a long life leftie, presently a paid-up member of the Labour Party.
The big news of the day seems to be that the government has retreated on the winter fuel allowance for pensioners, a fairly modest allowance of £200-£300 per household depending. Their idea had been to restrict this payment to people on benefits of one sort or another, which meant that a lot of low income people would no longer get it.
They have now chickened out and said that the bar will be set at £35,000 per head. I read this to mean that a household of two pensioners with two incomes of £30,000 will get it. A household of two with one income of £40,000 will get half of it. The bar has been set to roughly equate to the average full time wage.
Given that pensioners do not, on average, need as much stuff as people in full time work, quite possibly with both children and mortgage, not to mention a taste for foreign holidays, this strikes me as bad policy. Why not just dump the whole allowance, and adjust the income of low-income pensioners, if that is what you want to do, through the rest of our tax-benefit system?
If you are too frightened to come out and say to the voters that if you want defence and health, something like this has got to go, preferring instead to borrow a few more billions from the Petro-Arabs, what hope is there when more difficult decisions have to be made?
I won't tear up my party card, but maybe I will email my local branch.
PS: my belief is that the days when most pensioners were poor are gone. There are a lot of us, and quite a lot of us are quite comfortably off. Quite a lot of us are sitting in valuable chunks of real estate. Ripe for a bit of squeezing. Maybe I need to check.
References
Reference 1: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/nine-million-pensioners-to-receive-winter-fuel-payments-this-winter.
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