'Evil' plan to reduce access to winter fuel allowance leaves pensioners feeling 'ashamed'
"I'm deeply concerned about the winter," 81-year-old Kevin McGrath tells me when I meet him at his home in Corby, Northamptonshire.
He is recovering from a major eye operation when we sit down to chat, but he cannot contain his frustration.
The former Roman Catholic monk turned social worker said he has spent all of his life trying to help people and described Labour's plan to take the winter fuel allowance away from millions of pensioners as "evil".
"Of all the wealth in Britain, they target the ones who have very little in life," he said.
Won't make any discernible difference to us and receiving the allowance was always vaguely embarrassing, but as has already been said many times, interfering with it for a trivial saving was politically incompetent.
Worse than incompetent, because it told us we have elected a worthless bunch of dim, hypocritical ideologues with a leader who seems to be even worse than that. All of which is worth saying again, because as winter approaches this one won't go away.
6 comments:
I have a friend who has aphantasia, an inability to visualise past or potential future events. He’s an intelligent chap but sometimes makes odd or risky decisions because he can’t properly evaluate all the possible outcomes (for example, he is a fearless mountain biker because he simply can't imagine a crash).
Crowdsourced research suggests that this condition affects just under 1% of the population, with a further 3% having very limited ability to visualise. I wonder whether the incidence is higher among some groups - trade union officials and elected politicians, for example - because they confidently put themselves forward without mentally running scenarios of what could go wrong.
I’m already of the opinion that we have a Cabinet with an abnormally high rate of Dunning-Kruger syndrome; surely only someone with aphantasia could fail to play out in advance the consequences to the elderly poor of cutting the WFA (followed by Council Tax discount, bus passes and free prescriptions) or the public reaction to those cuts.
(Or, as you suggest, they may really be dim enough to see the rise in income intended to make up for inflation to date as extra discretionary income - a truly frightening prospect for future fiscal strategy.)
Macheath - thanks, that's a very interesting angle. It is easy to avoid the idea that there is something wrong with such people and just describe them as stupid, incompetent, evil or whatever, but in this case there clearly is something wrong with their ability to visualise future political consequences. We've seen it.
If we consider limited aphantasia and your 3% of the population, that's a large number of people and an ideology may be some kind of substitute for the ability to visualise - use a formula instead.
It looks like a spectrum where significant numbers of people aren't particularly good a visualising what ought to be fairly obvious future events.
Like you, I was glad to get it, but I can readily agree that I don't really need it and the government can make a legitimate saving here, if done properly.
What is really worrying is the lack of political acumen here - a sense that nobody foresaw the obvious political consequences. The same applies to the grinning replies from cabinet ministers that they accepted Taylor Swift tickets for their daughters, or "the Tories have always done it". It gets you thinking that if they haven't worked this out, then what else haven't they worked out?
It's like the point made here a few weeks ago about Lammy's disastrous "Mastermind" performance. It's not that he is too stupid to know that Henry VIII couldn't have preceded Henry VII. It's that he was too stupid to know that making a few silly errors under pressure would have him forever labelled as a total incompetent. Claiming to be a technocrat while lacking basic common sense is a difficult gig.
Sam - I agree, the lack of political acumen is really worrying, as if we've peeped into the inner workings of their political machine and it's like a child's classroom. Lammy should have known he wasn't up to a "Mastermind" performance, there is no shame in that, but he seems not to have known his own limitations.
Maybe we shouldn't be surprised that the Peter principle is particularly relevant to politics and such people really do rise to their level of incompetence
Not just a inability to envision past and future; I think the difficulty many have is with abstractions and the counterfactual; thus our political classes, rather than matters of principle or moral virtues they prefer excuses based on the concrete example 'the other lot did it'.
as to the WFA, I can live without it, it always seemed a bit silly and condescending to me, but inept politics all the same.
djc - yes, difficulty with counterfactual sounds very plausible as they don't like it at all except for rhetorical exaggeration in a "so what you are saying is" sense. The difficulty could be genuine too, because it's common enough in the general population as we all have some difficulty with counterfactual in at least some areas. Some more acutely than others though.
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