Starmer’s winter fuel cut U-turn claim ‘not credible’
Sir Keir Starmer’s claim he is U-turning on cutting winter fuel payments for pensioners because he now has the money is not “credible”, Harriet Harman has said.
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The Labour peer, speaking to Sky News political editor Beth Rigby on the Electoral Dysfunction podcast, said the prime minister made the move as it was so unpopular with voters.
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She also said Labour’s poor results at the local elections and the Runcorn and Helsby by-election were the “straw that broke the camel’s back”.
Sir Keir said on Wednesday he would ease the cut to the winter fuel payment, which has been removed from more than 10 million pensioners this winter after it became means-tested.
He and his ministers had insisted they would stick to their guns on the policy, even just hours before Sir Keir revealed his change of heart at PMQs
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Winter fuel payment cuts to be reversed
Baroness Harman said: “It’s always been contested and always been unpopular.
“But the final straw that broke the camel’s back was the elections. The council elections and the Runcorn by-election, where the voters were saying, ‘this is not the change we voted for’.
“At the end of the day, you cannot just keep flying in the face of what voters – particularly if they’re people who previously voted for you – wanted.”
Baroness Harman is unconvinced by Sir Keir’s claim he can U-turn because there is more money due to good economic management by the government.
“I don’t think that’s credible as an argument,” she said.
“It really is the fact that voters just said ‘this is not the change we voted for, we’re not going to have this’.”
The challenge for the government now, she said, is deciding who will get the allowance moving forward, when they’ll get it, and when it will all be announced.
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Chancellor Rachel Reeves has committed to just one major fiscal event a year, meaning just one annual budget in the autumn.
Autumn budgets normally take place in October, with the last one at the end of the month.
If this year’s budget is around the same date, it will leave little time for the extra winter fuel payments to be made, as they are paid between November and December.
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds told the Electoral Dysfunction podcast the economy will have to be “strong enough” for the government to U-turn on winter fuel payment cuts.
He also said the public would have to wait for the budget for any announcement.
The deal was announced in response to the White House’s recent policy strategy to make the United States the AI capital of the world.
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Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips has told Sky News that councils that believe they don’t have a problem with grooming gangs are “idiots” – as she denied Elon Musk influenced the decision to have a national inquiry on the subject.Â
The minister said: “I don’t follow Elon Musk’s advice on anything although maybe I too would like to go to Mars.
“Before anyone even knew Elon Musk’s name, I was working with the victims of these crimes.”
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Elon Musk. Pic: Reuters
Mr Musk had called Ms Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” in one of a series of inflammatory posts on X in January and said she should go to jail.
Mr Musk, then a close aide of US President Donald Trump, sparked a significant political row with his comments – with the Conservative Party and Reform UK calling for a new public inquiry into grooming gangs.
At the time, Ms Phillips denied a request for a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham on the basis that it should be done at a local level.
But the government announced a national inquiry after Baroness Casey’s rapid audit on grooming gangs, which was published in June.
Asked if she thought there was, in the words of Baroness Casey, “over representation” among suspects of Asian and Pakistani men, Ms Phillips replied: “My own experience of working with many young girls in my area – yes there is a problem. There are different parts of the country where the problem will look different, organised crime has different flavours across the board.
“But I have to look at the evidence… and the government reacts to the evidence.”
Ms Phillips also said the home secretary has written to all police chiefs telling them that data collection on ethnicity “has to change”, to ensure that it is always recorded, promising “we will legislate to change the way this [collection] is done if necessary”.
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Operation Beaconport has since been established, led by the National Crime Agency (NCA), and will be reviewing more than 1,200 closed cases of child sexual exploitation.
Ms Phillips revealed that at least “five, six” councils have asked to be a part of the national review – and denounced councils that believed they don’t have a problem with grooming gangs as “idiots”.
“I don’t want [the inquiry] just to go over places that have already had inquiries and find things the Casey had already identified,” she said.
She confirmed that a shortlist for a chair has been drawn up, and she expects the inquiry to be finished within three years.
Ms Phillips’s comments come after she announced £426,000 of funding to roll out artificial intelligence tools across all 43 police forces in England and Wales to speed up investigations into modern slavery, child sex abuse and county lines gangs.
Some 13 forces have access to the AI apps, which the Home Office says have saved more than £20m and 16,000 hours for investigators.
The apps can translate large amounts of text in foreign languages and analyse data to find relationships between suspects.
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