It was always wrong to give wealthy pensioners annual handouts
It was always wrong to give wealthy pensioners annual handouts
Winter fuel payments need to be means tested to stop intergenerational inequality growing
Two articles are linked below, written for the i, and UnHerd. The intense response to the first demonstrates the sheer political and cultural difficulty of tightening the belts of the boomer generation. Where was the outcry when working age benefits were cut far more savagely, or for wages remaining stagnant for over a decade while housing costs skyrocketed?
The second article discusses how the Tory leadership election has thus far focused on personality. I do not believe the party is yet psychologically ready to understand or accept the structural and strategic reasons for its great 2024 loss. It is much easier to process and discuss the tactical reasons for defeat. Without asking for a mandate for change, the victor will not be able to claim (and use) one.
We only need to observe the photo recently tweeted by former home secretary Suella Braverman to see the existential threat to the party should it not course correct from being a client party for retirees. Where is the physical future of the party?
It was always wrong to give wealthy pensioners annual handouts
Winter fuel payments need to be means tested to stop intergenerational inequality growing
Should millionaires receive benefit payments from the government, or should hard-earned taxpayers’ cash only be handed out to the truly needy? Amid claims of a £22bn “black hole” in the country’s finances, the answer to that question is clear. It would be offensively decadent to keep dishing out payments to wealthy members of our society while our public services feel the strain of years of underfunding.
Yet this is precisely the policy position on winter fuel payments that the incoming Labour Government inherited from the outgoing Conservatives. When one in four pensioners lives in a household with a net worth of more than a million pounds, when pensioners have £4,000 more disposable income a year than working age people, and when wages have been flatlining in real terms for over a decade, it’s high time the universal nature of such benefits was reconsidered.
Defending the move to cut the benefit for those not on pension credit or other means-tested benefits, Sir Keir Starmer said: “I know they’re unpopular, I know they’re difficult, of course they’re tough choices. Popular decisions aren’t tough, they are easy.” He is right to challenge the indulgence and political ease of the status quo…
To read this full article on the means testing of winter fuel payments, visit i using the link here: https://inews.co.uk/opinion/always-wrong-give-wealthy-pensioners-annual-handouts-3268989
Means testing pensioner benefits was a key recommendation in the paper I co-wrote with the Adam Smith Institute – recognising the nonsense of freely gifting taxpayer’s money to some of the wealthiest members of our society.
Have the Tories really learnt from their mistakes?
Soul-searching has not been evident during the leadership conterst
So Mel Stride has been knocked out of the latest round in the Tory leadership election. Remember Mel Stride? No, me neither. But as one of the few ministers left willing to go out to bat for Rishi Sunak’s dying government during the daily media rounds, could he really have represented the future of the Conservative Party anyway?
Not that the remaining candidates fare much better by this metric, former senior ministers as they all are. Each seeks to disown the inheritance they played their own personal part in building.
But a leadership campaign is an opportunity for ideological freedom — for unhelpful shibboleths to be discarded, biases to be challenged and fixed viewpoints and policy positions to be reassessed in all frankness. It is easy to deliver sermons on the moral failures of Boris Johnson’s premiership, or to lament the political and operational failures of the Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak governments: these are self-evident. It’s easy, too, to promise the red meat of tax cuts and an anti-woke agenda to the party base…
To read this full article on the tory leadership contest, visit Unherd using the link here: https://unherd.com/newsroom/have-the-tories-really-learnt-from-their-mistakes/