Instrumental Thinking

The Government has chosen to means-test the Winter Fuel Payment by Statutory Instrument, which means that while neither House of Parliament can amend it, either could just annul it. Assuming that it will have passed the House of Commons on Tuesday, then on Wednesday, Ros Altmann will invite the House of Lords to throw it out. That House would be perfectly within its rights to do so, and it should.

Not before time, the trade unions are coming out fighting against the attempt, either opportunistic or innumerate, to blame them for this, so their many veterans on the red benches should vote for the fatal motion. Obviously, all of the Lords Spiritual should turn up to do so. The report of the House of Lords Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee is devastating, and every member of that Committee should vote accordingly, including the three Labour ones, one of whom was Deputy Leader of the Labour Party until 2019. And every hereditary peer should vote to ask Keir Starmer how he intended to retaliate.

But it really should not be the job of the Lords to do this. Yet it is wholly unsurprising that it should be. More members of the Socialist Campaign Group voted to keep the two-child benefit cap than voted to lift it, including Clive Lewis, who had made such a fuss about the Oath of Allegiance. "The language of priorities is the religion of Socialism." From the wider Parliamentary Labour Party, Emma Lewell-Buck backed down and voted with the Government, and Rosie Duffield contracted Covid-19. This time, Lewell-Buck has expressed her concerns, but not how she intended to vote, if at all. Duffield has already said that she would be abstaining. Does she think that Starmer might one day make her a Minister? He never will, you know.

Unlike the vote on the two-child benefit cap, this will be legislative. If the House rejected this means test, then it would not become law. It has precisely one opportunity to do so. At the very least, all eyes, not to say Ayes, must be on Neil Duncan-Jordan and on the other Labour signatories to his Early Day Motion 115: Rachael Maskell (although she is saying that she is going to abstain), Jon Trickett, Lewis, Nadia Whittome, Kim Johnson, Simon Opher, Chris Hinchliff, Mary Kelly Foy, and Bell Ribeiro-Addy. Unless they voted against this, then how could they ever again expect to be taken seriously?

There are also the hardline pro-Israeli elements of the Parliamentary Labour Party. We may regard the recent restriction on arms to Israel as pitiful, but it is anathema to them. This is their chance to take a stand, and to do so in a way that would be well-received by their Constituency Labour Parties. We had all expected their éminence rouge to be made a Whip, and no doubt so had he. Well, a Whip is as a Whip does.

In the summer of 1992, official opinion was that the Conservative Party was going to be in power forever. Yet all of that came crashing down on 16 September. From then on, the Major Government was in its last days. Those dragged on for four and a half years. But everyone knew that they were its last days. In ascending order of likelihood, the Starmer Government is about to be defeated, or to be forced into a humiliating compromise, or to win a thoroughly pyrrhic victory that caused its never very great popularity to collapse. Of a freezing pensioner who had narrowly failed to meet the means test, one death this winter would be enough, and there is bound to be that. On Tuesday, this Government looks set to enter its last days. Stretched out over almost an entire Parliament. But still obviously its last days.