Build the socialist opposition

As the Socialist goes to press, Keir Starmer faced a ‘showdown’ in parliament as the hated cut to the winter fuel payment for pensioners went to a vote.

It is being dubbed as his ‘first political crisis’. 53 Labour MPs didn’t vote with the government.

The government has little regard for the crisis facing the 10 million people who will no longer get the £300 fuel payment from this winter.

The real ‘difficult decision’ being made, is by the millions of older people who were already struggling to pay their bills, now having to calculate which, if any, rooms they can afford to heat.

Starmer is now governing a country with the sixth biggest economy in the world, and 165 billionaires. What does it say about in whose interests Labour is governing, when they decide we can’t afford to heat older people’s homes?

No one is fooled by the crocodile tears of cabinet members lining up to back Starmer’s claim that they ‘have no choice’. Deaths among the elderly fell by 10,000 following the introduction of the Winter Fuel Payment.