'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.
1 comment:
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.)
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