As the nights begin to draw in, the brief euphoria of 5 July increasingly feels like something that happened in a lost time of sunny innocence. Today, amid deep dismay, the House of Commons approved the government’s ill-conceived and dangerous plan to withdraw the winter fuel allowance from most pensioners in England and Wales.
Rachel Reeves has reportedly given ministers and civil servants until Friday to draw up departmental savings. In some parts of Keir Starmer’s administration, meanwhile, minds are at least partly focused on interesting and exciting policies – but the Treasury is spreading a familiar sense of fear and foreboding.
