Starmer’s £22bn black hole excuse just got UTTERLY DESTROYED!

Right, so whilst Keir Starmer seems to have the words £22bn black hole stuck on repeat coming out of his lying mouth, Labour MPs have of course en masse voted through a gut wrenching cut to the winter heating expenditure given universally to the nations pensioners to try and pay that down apparently, yet literally the following day, half of that £1.5bn saving to try and fill a bit of that black hole in the finances, was given away by Keir Starmer. The Winter Fuel Allowance was literally introduced under the Blair government, it was Gordon Brown in 1997 as Chancellor who introduced it, yet this Labour government is so much further to the right of even that government, that they’ve now elected to scrap it to anyone who doesn’t get Pension Credit, affecting some 10m pensioners. Starmer is readily compared to Blair and although Tony Blair still crops up far too regularly to opine on policy matters, Starmer is proving to be dramatically worse. He did warn us himself though when he said he was going to be Tony Blair on steroids.
But to cut that money, to endanger the lives of 4000 more pensioners this winter to literally give half the cash away is sick, especially when you find out what that cash is being used for.
Right, so Labour have voted through the cut to the Winter Fuel Allowance, affecting 10m pensioners this winter, it was always going to pass, just 1 currently sitting Labour MP had the balls to vote against Starmer, along with 5 other Labour MPs who have already been suspended for voting against Starmer previously. The man is a dictator if MPs are going to be constantly punished for putting constituents before party, he’s done twice already in 2 months now, it’s a really bad look and completely anti democratic to carry on like that.
Where there have been reports of MPs crying as they went to vote this through, they can save their crocodile tears, they chose to put their careers first at the end of the day, not their constituents, every one of them utterly failed in their first duty as an MP.
Then there were the 53 abstainers, who lacked the courage of their conviction, who did not rebel, they just chickened out of standing by their constituents too, their own careers again first and foremost in their minds. There’s a quote attributed to novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky which sums them up beautifully, which reads:
‘Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing’.
Career came first for you didn’t it, but voters won’t forget your cowardice. Shame on you all as well. Some have allegedly said they are keeping dry for later, but if you’re not keeping your powder dry for something like this, then what?
But then there were the MPs who relished it on the Labour benches too. SNP MP Stephen Flynn wrote on Twitter that he saw an unnamed Labour MP do a double fist pump as they voted through the voting lobbies to cut the winter fuel payment, reminiscent of this image of Iain Duncan Smith from 2015 when George Osborne rebranded the minimum wage as the National Living Wage, even though you still couldn’t live on it.
Then there’s this chap, a new MP called Peter Lamb, the Labour MP for Crawley, who has said if pensioners don’t put their heating on this winter, it will be their choice and that pensioners will benefit from more cash for the NHS than for themselves. But is this money going to the NHS? Well we know where some of it is clearly going, and it wasn’t there, but I’ll come onto that in a moment.
There was of course massive hypocrisy on show too. After losing his seat in 2019, Gareth Snell has slithered back into parliament representing Stoke on Trent Central, but in 2017 when he was running for election, he posted this image, reading ;If re-elected I promise to vote against the dementia tax, the cutting of the winter fuel allowance and commit to protecting the pensions triple lock.’ He of course, voted to cut the winter fuel allowance.
Let’s not leave Keir Starmer out of this either, who put out a tweet just 2 years ago, August 2022, reading:
‘Looking ahead to winter is frightening.
I’ve met pensioners who have no idea how they’ll heat their homes.
Parents who will have to skip meals so their kids can eat.
The Tories are too busy fighting each other to notice.
Labour has a plan that meets the scale of this crisis.’
Meets it and makes it worse it seems as the two child benefit cap remains, so parents still choose between feeding their kids or themselves and pensioners now between heating and eating. People on an income of £12,000 have just had their incomes cut by people on at least £92,000 is another way of looking at it.
The sheer needlessness of this needs to be put into perspective though, because I’m sick of Starmer hiding behind that £22bn black hole line.
It sounds like a lot of money, to all of us, it’s an unimaginable sum and that’s half the trouble, because it becomes impossible to visualise. So let’s put in perspective a moment so we can appreciate the real size of it in the grand scheme of our economy and is it such a devastatingly large sum it will collapse the economy?
UK spending last year was £1.2tn. A trillion is a thousand billion. We’re talking about £22bn. It basically works out as just 1.83% of that. If you watched Lucy Powell’s car crash interview where she said this cut had to be voted through to pensioners winter fuel allowance as if the economy depended on it, if you listened to Jonathan Reynolds say this was a cut that had to be made because Labour had no choice, this is what they were really talking about. 1.83% of the economy. It’s a stupidly small sum and this cut to the winter fuel allowance doesn’t even touch the sides of filling this small sum, which frankly is money that could be borrowed and wouldn’t even make much a difference to the national debt, it’s current £2.25tn, borrowing this would raise it to £2.27tn. That’s just borrowing it. A wealth tax would fill it and a lot more besides. It’s also such a small amount, you can also argue it can basically be ignored until growth returns and it would pay itself off over time. This is the stupidity and the abject cruelty of what Starmer has done and his cowardly or callous MPs have voted through or refused to take a stand against. And it’s not like it’s even actually being used to fill this black hole, that actually this is just an excuse for Starmer to find money to do what he wants and that is exactly what is happening it seems as £600m the day after this cut was voted through, a little under half of the money being saved from this callous cut, has just been given away. Starmer and David Lammy have handed £600m to Volodymyr Zelensky, having already given him £3bn since coming to power and promising £3bn a year for as long as it takes for the war with Russia to finally end.
We have a £22bn black hole that requires cut to fill we keep getting told and yet Starmer gives even more money away to Ukraine, the day after this cut. For as much as you might support the Ukrainian cause, do you want to pay for it at this cost? Have we not already given them enough?
There’s always money for war isn’t there? And goodness knows Starmer really loves posing on the international stage, loves posturing in combat gear, but it also shows that cuts like they’ve just pushed through don’t stop them spending where they want to and that should put this entire debt in the perspective that it needs to be, that every wine and whinge and every cut they say has to be made, is a choice, it is not a necessity, not if we’re still giving millions on top of billions away in international aid, regardless of how valid it cause it may be. The money given this time will apparently be used for – and you will laugh – to strengthen Ukraine’s economy. Humanitarian assistance to the most vulnerable Ukrainians is being paid for by freezing our pensioners. Restoring access to Ukrainian energy sources is being paid for with the heating money for our pensioners and more besides.
Starmer’s Labour is twisted and cruel beyond belief. So he can pose as a strong ally of Ukraine, so he can walk in lockstep with the US setting UK foreign policy as they are, not just here but elsewhere too, he punishes the people of this country to do it. First the young now the old. And come next budget, with more cuts, more hardship, more cruelty to come, remember the spending choices and for goodness sake, bear that £22bn black hole in the perspective it needs to be held in, because it really is nothing in the grand scheme of things and every cut made in the name of filling it, is an unnecessary choice.
For more on the pathetic showing of Labour MPs defending their elderly constituents as well as the one MP who showed enough courage to defy Starmer’s authoritarianism you can get all the details on this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.