Innocents abroad

I was very pleased that we were getting a Labour government after 14 years of suffering with the Tories

I have never voted for the conservatives and I never will.

I am a little worried because of the lack of experience of many of the people now in parliament and indeed in the Cabinet

And I know that they have to save money somewhere somehow without upsetting too many people. Already the Times reports that many of the top wealthy people in Britain are going to leave before or soon after the autumn budget.

They don’t want to pay more tax and they should be sharing wealth . But if they are like that we’re better without them.

In any case it’s an old story that’s always being rolled out by some newspaper and the Times is no longer what it used to be

The winter fuel payments were never part of the state pension but they were introduced by Gordon brown in 1997

Only a labour Government coukd risk changing them

And that’s what they are planning to do. Well no matter how much it saves it seems to have given ammunition to their enemies. As well as that there is a lot of opposition to Keir Starmer himself and his chancellor Rachel reeves from the left wing in the Labour Party who believed that he us no longer a left wing person. They don’t feel grateful that he has won the election at all whereas I do.

So he’s being attacked in two directions. It’s a pity that they didn’t think about this more before it was made public.

Instead of abolishing it for everybody except those on pension credits they could have made it taxable which would mean that the wealthy would pay 40% And moderately wealthy would pay 20% and poorer people would not pay anything at all in to the taxman.

Even this would have been criticized by the conservatives and by the press but it’s defensible

After all  state pensions rose by 900 pounds two years ago and by 400 pounds in the last year

Removing it entirely from people who just are a few pounds of pension credit is very tough it doesn’t look sympathetic at all and I think people do expect labour to be more kind to the poor or the old or the cripples than the Tories are.

There are arguments on both sides which are quite coherent and logical

But if you wanted to give some on a stick to beat you is you either remove something from children or from the elderly.

And it puzzles me because the prime minister is a very intelligent man and Rachel Reeves is a very intelligent woman

I’m not arguing against what they’re doing but I’m saying did they really know what the effect would be in the media. Always looking for bad news.. or for pretending something is bad news when it is not.

What they really need in their team is someone who has worked advertising

And that rules out me.

My speech to text calls the Tories the notorious and that’s quite a good name for them