Labour MPs’ ‘tears’ won’t keep the elderly warm this winter

Why were Labour MPs threatened with losing the party whip, and what does it mean? ANDREW FISHER on how Croydon’s MPs voted over the removal of pensioners’ Winter Fuel Payment

The decision to cut the Winter Fuel Payment for 9-out-of-10 pensioners has proved controversial for Labour, has seen MPs’ inboxes deluged with correspondence, while a petition raised by charity Age UK attract half a million signatures, in what has become the first major skirmish for Keir Starmer’s new government.

Britain has the lowest basic state pension in Europe. Our housing is also among the least well-insulated across the continent. The Winter Fuel Payment was brought in by Tony Blair’s Labour Government in 1997. It was a policy intended to help pensioners with extra heating costs in winter.

This week, Labour MPs voted to cut the allowance for more than 10 million pensioners. The political reporter Lewis Goodall said after the vote, “Am told there were several Labour MPs in tears in the voting lobbies when voting for the winter fuel changes this afternoon.” Those tears won’t keep pensioners warm this winter.

If you’re a Labour MP and you were that upset about voting for it, then you probably should have voted against it.

I have no inside knowledge about the moistness of their eyeballs, but all three of Croydon’s Labour MPs – Natasha Irons (Croydon East), Sarah Jones (Croydon West), and Steve Reed (Streatham and Croydon North) voted to cut the cut to Winter Fuel Payments.

For the record, Croydon’s other MP, Conservative Chris Philp (Croydon South) voted to keep the payment.

In total, 53 Labour MPs refused to back the cut and abstained. THey included south London MPs Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting) and Marsha De Cordova (Battersea). The MP for Clapham and Brixton Hill, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, tweeted that she was absent as she was attending her father’s funeral in Ghana. “If I was able to attend in-person, I would be voting against these cuts,” she said.

A number of Labour MPs elected for the first time in 2024 also abstained, including Worthing West MP Dr Beccy Cooper and Neil Duncan-Jordan, the new MP for Poole, who had tabled an Early Day Motion calling on the Government “to postpone the ending of Winter Fuel Payments and establish a comprehensive strategy to tackle fuel poverty, health inequality and low incomes among older people”.

The ITV journalist Shehab Khan reported that many MPs who abstained did so as a show of opposition, with one telling him: “I wanted to vote against but I would struggle to do my job if I did. Abstaining was the best I could do. I’m so angry.”

What did they mean about not being able to do their job?

Labour whips – the leadership’s bullies in the House of Commons, responsible for party “discipline” – had been warning MPs that if they rebelled, they faced being expelled from the party. They will have remained as MPs, but they would be forced to sit as independents.

Back in July, seven Labour MPs – Apsana Begum, Richard Burgon, Ian Byrne, Imran Hussain, Rebecca Long Bailey, John McDonnell and Zarah Sultana – all had the Labour whip removed for voting for an SNP amendment to the King’s Speech which sought to remove the two-child benefit limit.

Despite losing the whip, the seven MPs have all managed to do their jobs as constituency MPs effectively.

Not having the Labour whip, despite having been selected as Labour candidates by local members and elected as Labour MPs by their constituents, would however mean they could not stand for Labour again if an election was called tomorrow.

The only Labour MP currently holding the whip who rebelled over Winter Fuel Payments was Jon Trickett. The MP for Hemsworth in West Yorkshire was a former Parliamentary Private Secretary to Gordon Brown – who as Chancellor introduced the Winter Fuel Allowance (as it was originally called) 27 years ago.

Later in 1997, Labour’s then social security secretary, self-declared feminist Harriet Harman, steered through cuts to lone parent benefit (affecting a cohort of overwhelmingly working-class women).

At that time, around 50 Labour MPs rebelled and voted against the cut, including Jeremy Corbyn, McDonnell and Diane Abbott. Three parliamentary private secretaries resigned from their roles.

Not a single one had the whip withdrawn by Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Jeremy Corbyn, for example, over the course of 13 years, rebelled against the last Labour government hundreds of times – including over the war in Iraq, university tuition fees, ID cards and foundation hospitals. John McDonnell and Diane Abbott were regular rebels in the Blair years, too.

Former Labour leader Harold Wilson is supposed to have said of his party, “A bird needs two wings to fly.”

The removal of the whip from the seven MPs, and the threat of withdrawing the whip over Winter Fuel Payments, says much about Keir Starmer’s thin-skinned intolerance for dissent and his lack of support for Labour’s traditional broad church approach.

Strong leaders are not insecure about such a plurality of views – in fact most people probably think it’s quite healthy for political parties to have a range of views within them, and for debate to be heard, rather than bullied away with threats of disciplinary measures.

That is no longer the case in the Labour Party – and it is all the poorer for it.

The role of an MP is to represent their constituents’ interests, not be reduced to some weak-kneed, sobbing automaton, “lobby fodder” that votes for whatever nonsense the leadership orders.

From 2015 to 2019, Andrew Fisher, pictured right, was the Labour Party’s Director of Policy under Jeremy Corbyn. Fisher is also the author of The Failed Experiment – and how to build an economy that works, and now writes columns for InsideCroydon, the i newspaper and is a regular pundit on BBC and Sky News programmes

Andrew Fisher’s recent columns:

Dear Angela: It’s time for you to act and fund Croydon fairly

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A chill wind is blowing as Labour breaks pensioners’ pledge

‘Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others!’

Click here for more by Andrew Fisher

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