Last week’s exclusive weekly polling for The Independent is perhaps the biggest indication of why Rachel Reeves has performed a huge U-turn on winter fuel.
The breakdown of the Techne UK weekly tracker poll revealed that 36 per cent of pensioners now plan to vote for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK – a full 20 points ahead of Labour’s 16 per cent.
As any political analyst or experienced campaigner will know, the group of voters most likely to vote are pensioners. Which may explain why pensioners with a joint income of £75,000 will now get the winter fuel payment – but hard-up younger voters who cannot even get a mortgage are left to struggle.
The same logic has applied to the increasingly unaffordable triple lock on the state pension rise each year, while the government looks to slash benefits for the disabled and says it cannot afford to expand child benefit to more than two children per family.
Labour MPs and activists came back from the Runcorn by-election, which was narrowly lost to Reform, and the local elections in May with a simple message: at the doorsteps, people were complaining about the loss of the winter fuel allowance.
The issue turned Keir Starmer and Reeves into hate figures, with nobody apparently willing to buy the argument that they needed to fill a £22bn black hole left by the Tories.
Angry pensioners also probably account for the biggest group of voters to turn to Farage and Reform from Labour. The statistics show that the older voters are, the more attracted they are to Reform’s message.
So it seems likely that the winter fuel policy announcement by Labour at midday on Monday – the exact moment Farage was due to deliver a keynote speech in Port Talbot, a Labour heartland of south Wales – was deliberately aimed to stop the flow of voters moving away from Labour to Reform, as well as a slide in the polls, with Farage’s party now around eight points ahead.
It is fair to say that Farage was laughing at Labour when he took the stage 10 minutes late, no doubt to digest the news. But it handed him ammunition to back up his claim that there is “no doubt Reform are making the political weather”.
After all, it was Farage who said winter fuel would be restored by Reform. Now Labour is doing it.
Before, he announced Labour would nationalise British Steel. Soon after, Labour did it.
It is only a matter of time before Labour do another thing Farage has claimed Reform will do and remove the two-child benefit cap.
Maybe Labour will follow his suggestion of reigniting Port Talbot’s blast furnaces too. The drop in support for Wales run by Labour for 26 years is terrifying those around Starmer.
After his speech, Labour put out a comment saying: “Nigel Farage is all talk, no plan, and would risk chaos, cuts and decline for Britain.
“He admitted today that it is a ‘massive, expensive job to reopen blast furnaces’ costing ‘in the low billions’, without offering any explanation for how he would pay for it.
“Reform UK is just not serious. Labour will invest in Britain’s future through our Plan for Change, while reckless Reform would crash the economy and leave working people paying the price through higher bills and mortgage costs.”
The problem, though, is that Farage does not need to cost his plans or justify how he will pay for them if Labour goes and does them as a reaction to him announcing new policies.
Whichever way one looks at it, the decision to restore winter fuel to 9 million of the 11 million pensioners who lost it and the way it was done underlines that Labour is running scared of Reform and Farage.
