Rachel Reeves has announced that winter fuel payments will only be paid to those on Pension Credit.nsion Credit

New moniker doing the rounds:

Rachel Thieves seems an apt name for our new chancellor.

Jeremy Hunt is on video explaining that Reeves is spending £1 billion a day so far. Great British Energy, The Wealth Fund (a misnomer?) and public sector pay increases. What a start and how will it end?

C’mon. Abbott will happily criticise everything the government does. If her beloved Corbyn had been more electable the country would probably be in a much better place today than it is having had several years of a government fighting with each other. She doesn’t want Starmer to succeed.

ronib

Jeremy Hunt is on video explaining that Reeves is spending £1 billion a day so far. Great British Energy, The Wealth Fund (a misnomer?) and public sector pay increases. What a start and how will it end?

How will it end?

One word -Badly

Merion

I still maintain that withdrawing WFA at such short notice was indiscriminately cruel. For two winters we have had enhanced payments of £500 or £600 depending on age because of the cost of living crisis. If someone heats their home for six months then that was a very welcome £83 or £100 a month toward those costs. I think WFA was reverting to £200 or £300 this year but it would still have been £33 or £50 a month that people were budgeting on. Reeves would be the frst to day we need to budget responsibly. To take away WFA just a month before the cold weather sets in in some parts of the country seems heartless. How is someone on a limited budget meant to meet that shortfall? Yes, the Chancellor has some hard decisions to make but why this particular benefit? Because it was a quick and easy target? Warmth is at the very base of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: food, water, shelter, warmth and rest. The 1.5 billion saving is a drop in the ocean. As, I said upthread, she should have left WFA alone until other measures were put in place to protect those who are entitled to but not yet receiving pension credit and the results of the Ofgem review of energy standing charges that are costing households £300 a year irrespective of how much energy they use.

!00% agree Merion

Isn’t one of the problems with energy costs is that the previous government got rid of our storage facilities?

Well I didn’t vote for labour and I am not surprised. I am not claiming pension credit so will lose out. I am still working part time at 71 because my state pension and tiny private pension wouldn’t be enough to live on if I did not . ( I still like working but that’s not the point I’ll have to stop at some point)

Labours answer to everything is more taxes or make things more uncomfortable for ordinary people in some other way

GrannyGravy13

Peartree I do not need the WFA

I will complain and campaign for it to be reinstated for those who do, those who miss out by a few £’s.

Far more effective than maligning other GN members…

Well said. Too much maligning going on altogether, imo.

MaizieD

^I watched Reeves giving the speech. She repeated said: If we cannot afford it, we cannot do it. But there are a lot of things that the government cannot afford else we wouldn’t have a national debt sitting at around 2.7 trillion.^

Even Jonathon Portes, who is a far from heterodox economists points out that this is an inversion of Keynes well known dictum 'if we can do it we can afford it'. It was this thinking that gave us the NHS and nationalisation post WW2. And it was Keynesian economics that gave us growth and diminishing inequality up to the 1970s.

As to the 'national debt', this article, from a left wing site and I don't necessarily agree with some of its conclusions, does make an effort to find out what constitutes the national debt.
According to OBR figures, of the >£2 trillion owed, £371 billion (or around a quarter) is owed to the Bank of England (BoE). This is about the same as the national deficit.

The BoE is owned by the nation, so in effect this amount is owed by the nation to the nation. There is no imperative for it to be 'repaid'.

The Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum describes the situation as the BoE “nearly financing the deficit.” In addition, £172 billion is owed to the UK’s state bank, National Savings and Investment. So, we owe around one-third the debt to ourselves..

Do you want the government to repay your premium bond holdings or any money you have in an NSI account?

Much of the remaining two-thirds of the national debt is held by private gilt buyers.

Gilt buyers

It turns out that after the UK, Belgium held £197bn-worth of British government debt, followed by Luxembourg (£17 billion), Spain (£440 million), Germany (£289 million), and the USA (£23 million). After that, there was a drop off (e.g., UAE £3 million, Ireland £2.3 million).

So about another third. We're not exactly in hock to the rest of the world...

And the remaining third?

In response to FOI requests the Debt Management Office basically refuse to say

TLE asked the DMO “which companies (e.g., pension funds, asset managers) and entities (including corporations and individual investors), both legal and beneficial, hold UK gilts.” The DMO responded: “The DMO holds information on registered legal holders of gilts, but not on underlying beneficial holders.” So, who are the registered legal holders? The DMO further stated: “The gilts register is not a publicly available document, and corporate and individual holders therefore have a reasonable expectation that details of their holdings will not be disclosed”–even when public money is servicing their debts.

But:

The BBC says that the “buyers of these bonds, or ‘gilts’, are mainly financial institutions, like pension funds, investment funds, banks and insurance companies.

These institutions hold gilts (government bonds) because they are safe investments with a guaranteed return. The government, as a sovereign currency issuer will always pay the interest and principle. So, without those holdings your private pensions would be far less safe, because all other 'investments' carry risk.

Of course, this explanation doesn't account for the secondary bond market, which is basically a speculative vehicle for bond holders to maximise their profits from bond sales. These bondholders won't be contributing much to the domestic economy because they are, in the main, already wealthy and the wealthy have a low propensity to spend in the domestic market.

www.thelondoneconomic.com/business-economics/who-owns-our-national-debt-its-a-secret-287907/

This is one fairly reasonable analysis of the national debt. It does, in fact, comprise individuals and institutions savings and investment. Which bit do you want to be paid back?

It could be said that we could do without the speculators in the secondary bond market and just pay more government spending directly via the Bank of England.

So well informed. Thank you, MaisieD

Urmstongran

Even Diane Abbott accuses Rachel Reeves of ‘renewed austerity’ today. The Veteran Left-wing MP takes aim at Chancellor’s spending cuts and warns of ‘more to come’!

Best hold onto our hats.

Himself just said “no wonder their manifesto was so ‘lite’ - little in the way of detail so it couldn’t be challenged afterwards!”

Even’!! Priceless [grin

Casdon sorry to be dim but I don’t understand your message quoting me?

And before I toddleoff to make the gravy, let’s remember - didn't turn to Labour, they turned away from the Conservatives.

Yes, thank you MaisieD and either Reeves doesn’t understand this, or she is ignoring it in favour of Austerity. She was after all a banker.

I wish the Media would challenge the government on some of these points instead of accepting the popular “household budget” theme constantly rolled out.

It made me smile that you put ‘Even’ when saying Diane Abbott accused Rachel Reeves Urmstongran - we all know how left she is politically, if she’d agreed with anything the current government does, I would eat my hat!

David49

I wonder if she meant to misquote Keynes, who said (to paraphrase) If we can do it, we can afford it

That depends on the state of the economy, if the investment yields a cash return then yes do it, the UK has been investing far too much in projects/services that don’t yield any return even in the long term.
Because there has not been a return borrowing has had to increase to balance the books

David if you are going to quote anyone (in this case me on the first two lines of your post) it’s much clearer for those reading if you either use the quote function, or put quotes in italics, or even in quotation marks, and also say who you are quoting.

MaizieD I was sceptical about RR before the election.

Now I find her terrifying.

She is determined to carry on with austerity, and will probably take it to greater extremes than the Conservatives.

Casdon

It made me smile that you put ‘Even’ when saying Diane Abbott accused Rachel Reeves Urmstongran - we all know how left she is politically, if she’d agreed with anything the current government does, I would eat my hat!

Ah. Thanks Casdon I understand now. Thank you for clarifying!

It will be much better if Rachel Reeves introduced an ‘opt out’ system. The well-off pensioners who do not need the winter fuel allowance, they can go online and complete an opt out form. Everybody else who need it will still get it.

The way she did it - a blanket approach will result in a higher number of poor pensioners admitted to hospital this coming winter because they develop pneumonia or malnutrition.

I am a long way from state pension age, my husband is the one who received the WFA.

I do not look forward to winter. Our winter energy bill is always high but if I turn down the heating over a long period to save money, my husband will become ill.

Siope

I usually do use quotation mark especially if I’m challenging an opinion, in this case I assumed the quote was correct, and not contentious

Some on this forum would say that all spending brings a return to revenue, this has not been happening for many years, so any reference to economic theory is misplaced

It was a bloody awful decision to remove the WFD and I wish that other Labour voters on here would just accept that instead of trying to whitewash it.
Mum said last night that she wishes she hadn’t voted for them and is worried about what else will go, and we are a longstanding Labour voter family.Am astounded they have done this, gone after the low hanging fruit the minute they got into power.This is a really bad move on their part.🤬

Siope

David49

I wonder if she meant to misquote Keynes, who said (to paraphrase) If we can do it, we can afford it

That depends on the state of the economy, if the investment yields a cash return then yes do it, the UK has been investing far too much in projects/services that don’t yield any return even in the long term.
Because there has not been a return borrowing has had to increase to balance the books

David if you are going to quote anyone (in this case me on the first two lines of your post) it’s much clearer for those reading if you either use the quote function, or put quotes in italics, or even in quotation marks, and also say who you are quoting.

It's even better if it's put in italics or bold so that it stands out from the response.

I don't know why people have stopped doing that.

Who is trying to whitewash it Oreo? Nobody at all wants to see people go cold because they can’t pay to heat their home.

If we reach the stage where we are able to have a mature discussion about the potential ways forward to support people who are just outside the threshold that would be helpful I think, rather than mudslinging (I don’t mean you, I’m talking generally). It’s happening, whether Gransnetters like it or not, so what can we offer to help, there’s a lot of knowledge on this site about all sorts.

Ronib, labour really does not like pensioners, you are absolutely spot on.

Who did the tories like, apart from themselves, I mean?

Can't help thinking that it's off, a new

Well the Tories gave us the Triple Lock and a big rise this year and the extra money for heating put into our accounts as well as the Winter Fuel Allowance and Rachel Thieves (good name that) and LIEbour (another apt name) took it away.