And Another Thing…

MUCH of the media are getting very excited at the prospect of “middle class benefit cuts” to pay for Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms package.

But we can all relax in respect of at least one area where speculation about cuts is dead wrong: the Winter Fuel Allowance will not be curtailed for younger pensioners, as some of the papers have been reporting. How do I know this? Because the Prime Minister said so during the election campaign. He was asked by the BBC’s James Lansdale about Labour claims that the Tories would cut some key benefits. Cameron got quite touchy:

Let me take this opportunity to say very clearly to any pensioner who is watching this or or reading any of these reports: I know you are getting letters from the Labour Party that says (sic) the Conservative Party would cut the Winter Fuel Allowance, would cut the free bus travel, would cut free television licenses.

Those statements by Labour are quite simply lies. I don’t use the word “lie” very often but I use it today because they are lies. A Conservative government would keep the winter fuel allowance, would keep the free television licence, would keep the extra money for pensioners.

If things had been left at that, Cameron would still have had some wiggle room as far as the Winter Fuel Allowance was concerned; after all, keeping a benefit doesn’t necessarily exclude restricting or rationing it at some point. But Lansdale persevered:

Just to be clear, you would keep the benefits but you would not change them in any way? You will not means test, you will not change the criteria?

And the soon-to-be PM was refreshingly unequivocal:

We will keep what we will inherit in all these important areas.

So, there you have it: David Cameron has promised explicitly to keep the Winter Fuel Allowance exactly as he inherited it. So any journalist who claims that the qualification criteria is about to change is not only dead wrong, they are calling the PM a liar.

And that’s not a word I use very often.

CREDIT where it’s due: Hopi Sen has been banging on about the Winter Fuel Allowance for ages now, boring strangers in bus queues and generally frightening the animals with his warnings that our lovely Tory government is preparing to scrap it.

Of course, it turns out he’s wrong, as evidenced by this video unearthed by by the ever helpful LabourList, in which Dave, during the election campaign, accused Labour of lying when we said they might scrap the allowance.

So “Acting Prime Minister (snigger)” Nick Clegg had no need to reassure the nation this morning that no decisions have yet been made and that we would have to await the spending review statement in the autumn; all he had to do was watch this video of his leader stating unequivocably that the Winter Fuel Allowance, in its current form, will be maintained.

“But that was a commitment for a Tory government,” I hear you cry. “We don’t have a Tory government -- it’s a coalition!”

Does that mean that the Tories governing on their own would have kept their promise on the Winter Fuel Allowance, but because they’re hitched to the LibDems, they’re going to cut it?

Was the spirit of “The New Politics” ever better expressed than in this helpful “compare and contrast” guide by Total Politics?