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Keir Starmer’s top team is unapologetic about the cut to the winter fuel payment for millions of pensioners as the party chair warned “we have to get the money from somewhere” on the eve of Labour’s conference in Liverpool.
Rising star in the cabinet Ellie Reeves, who is due to open the conference on Sunday, has insisted the government shouldn’t “paper over the cracks” as she admitted she understood that the party would face a wave of emotion if pensioners die this winter in cold homes.
Her warning, in an exclusive interview with The Independent, comes as Sir Keir prepares to square up again to the left of the party trying to embarrass him by demanding the reversal of the winter fuel cut.
Despite widespread criticism and calls for a U-turn after chancellor Rachel Reeves was given £10bn extra headroom by the Bank of England, her sister Ellie Reeves said that the government is sticking with its plans.
“We could pretend everything is fine and paper over the cracks. But it’s not going to solve any of the country’s problems. That’s why Keir talked about fixing the foundations.
“If you buy a new house and you know it’s rotten in the foundation you don’t just sort of wallpaper the walls, because, you know, in a year, it’s all just going to fall apart. You’ve got to fix the foundations.”
It comes as Sir Keir Starmer’s approval rating has dropped to its lowest ever ahead of his party’s first conference since coming into power.
The prime minister’s net approval rating has fallen even further to -26 per cent, with a majority now disapproving of the way he is handling his job, Opinium’s lastest poll has revealed.
The issue of winter fuel and plight of pensioners is an issue which persists and is expected to dominate the four-day event, with the Unite union – which previously refused to endorse Labour’s election manifesto and supported former leader Jeremy Corbyn – proposing a motion to reverse the cuts.
But Ms Reeves has made it clear that the £22bn black hole left in the public finances by the Tories must be accounted for somehow.
“The decision about winter fuel, it isn’t a position that we wanted to be in. No one wants to be in the position, but you’ve got to make those sorts of choices.
“We saw what happened under the Conservatives when they lost control of the economy. People remember it acutely because they’re still paying more in their mortgages because of it.”
The Labour chair confided that the experience of previous Tory mismanagement in 1992, when the pound crashed on Black Monday, is one of the things which encouraged her and her sister to take a career in politics.
“I can remember my mum at the end of every month getting her credit card bill and having to go through her bank account really, really carefully matching everything up, making sure there was enough left at the end.
“I can remember how interest rates shot through the roof in the early 1990s. There’d be this sort of despair about how to pay the mortgage.”
Ms Reeves is one of Sir Keir’s handpicked lieutenants because of her history in taking on the Corbyn allies in Momentum.
In 2016, after Corbyn won the leadership, Momentum forced her off the ruling National Executive Committee (NEC) in the year she was about to take over as its chair.
Then, after getting elected as an MP in 2017, she faced an attempted deselection by Momentum in her Lewisham West and Penge seat in southeast London in 2019 because of her opposition to controversial figure Chris Williamson being restored to the party.
“There was a backlash from Momentum members in my constituency party. I was pregnant at the time. There was a member that wanted to bring a motion to deselect me and various things like that, so I had to deal with all of that.”
Ms Reeves admits she has become a “face of change” that Sir Keir brought to the Labour Party after the Corbyn years.
But she insisted that there would have been no victory without the change brought under Starmer’s leadership after the “huge, catastrophic defeat” in 2019, when she admits that some in the party were wondering whether it would survive.
“People will say the [2024] result was pre-ordained because the Tories were in such a mess. But I just don’t think that’s true because the Tories were in a mess, but unless people trusted us on the economy and on things like national security, then they wouldn’t have given us a look either, quite frankly.”
Reeves remains fiercely loyal to Starmer, particularly over the issue of him taking £107,000 worth of gifts since 2019. Labour spent a lot of time attacking Boris Johnson and other Tories over gifts including wallpaper for Downing Street. But Ms Reeves insisted: “You cannot really compare Keir to Boris’s rule-breaking.”
Her comments came as Sir Keir, Rachel Reeves and Angela Rayner announced they would no longer take donations for clothes.
Meanwhile, Ellie Reeves has registered going to the Brit Awards with Google.
She is also dismissive of claims of “cash for access” for Labour peer Lord Alli, whose donations included £5,000 in dresses for Victoria Starmer and who was given a temporary security pass for Downing Street.
“He’s highly respected, both within the party, and across parties, and did a huge amount of work for the party on fundraising, for example, for the general election,” she said.
Even the prime minister has admitted that there is a lot of “gloom” around his government at the moment with some of the tough decisions which have been made.
Ms Reeves suggests that may continue but tells party members to find optimism in Labour’s victory after 14 years.
“We all head to Liverpool for conference and have an opportunity to reflect on the election result and how we got to the position where we were able to win that trust and win the election,” she said.
“I think there’s a tale of optimism simply in that but then we will need to talk about the economic inheritance that we’ve got – because that is the reality facing the country.”
There is disappointment for others too, not least those who want to see Brexit reversed. Ms Reeves, like Sir Keir and her sister, was a powerful advocate for stopping Brexit and supported a second referendum. But now the party will not consider going back into the single market.
For Ms Reeves, she says the issue is that trying to unpick Brexit will inevitably do what leaving the EU did in parliament and take up all the time needed for other important reforms and bigger priorities.
“I was elected in 2017 and my recollection of my first few years of parliament is all we all talked about was Brexit,” she said. “There was nothing, there was nothing else at all.”
But one area she does want to see some changes to is the prisons, where Labour has been hit by a massive overcrowding problem and had to release thousands of criminals early.
As a former shadow prisons minister, Ms Reeves admits she was not surprised by the crisis.
“I saw some pretty horrific things. People didn’t leave their cells for 23 hours a day because prisons are so overcrowded – really poor conditions often caused by that overcrowding and, frankly, the last government had absolutely no plan to fix any of that,” she said.
“We certainly need more prison places, and the last government failed to build those prison places. We also need to make sure that prisons are a place of rehabilitation as well as punishment.”
