That sounded like a totemic cut, one that everyone could understand. She cut old folk’s winter fuel allowance! Is it like Margaret Thatcher, milk snatcher, abolishing free school milk? No, not at all. In the budget, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will need to make sure that poorer pensioners are better protected with improvements to pension credit, but the winter fuel payment was always a misbegotten benefit.
Here’s its history: in the early days of New Labour, the government stuck to its needless pledge to follow every jot and tittle of Tory spending policy. Ken Clarke, the former chancellor who had set those eye-watering plans, laughed out loud and said he had never intended to stick to them himself.
Pensions were miserably low, so Gordon Brown added the winter fuel payment in 1997 as a bung to soothe the problem without interfering with the benefit uprating system. The payment was an oddity, a universal tax-free bonus. You didn’t have to spend it on fuel and very rich pensioners got it, too. Good people often donated it to charity at Christmas. Less good folk did as the Spectator editor, Fraser Nelson, recently described: “A millionaire I know has a tradition every year: he buys a bottle of vintage wine with his winter fuel payment and invites friends to drink it. His point is that it’s ludicrous that people like him are given handouts by the government.”
Universal benefits, in theory binding everyone to support the social security system, often have the........