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.
