Sir Keir has badly misjudged things in thinking that means-testing the winter fuel payment would be an easy and justifiable cut to make.
Surprise, the assumption that most pensioners are well-off retirees living out their twilight years in feather-nested idyll, and are therefore easy game, turns out to be completely false.
Many pensioners live on little more than the state pension and, with higher fuel bills to come, stand to be pushed further towards the breadline when denied the payment. This, by the way, should not be regarded as an entitlement per se, but like the state pension as a kind of tax rebate after years of paying into the system.
But it’s not just the lack of forethought that grates. The cancellation is almost certainly a false economy, prompting many pensioners to apply for tax credits – shunned in the past out of pride – so as to meet the threshold for means-testing.
The messaging is as damaging as the act itself. At a stroke, the Labour leadership has both signalled that it cannot be trusted to do what it says, and that older cohorts are more broadly in its crosshairs in addressing shortfalls in the public finances.
It’s true that pensioners have in aggregate enjoyed larger increases in income than working-age cohorts since the introduction of the triple lock 14 years ago. But they started from a low base, and after a lifetime of toil, many of them still struggle to make ends meet.
If the Government intends to make “intergenerational unfairness” part of its wider policy agenda, the better place to start would surely be with measures to help the young, not ones designed to level down the elderly to the same state of supposed penury.
We have, however, been warned. “Things can only get worse before they get better.” If abolition of the universal winter fuel payment is the direction of travel, there will be no promised land at the end of the route march; things will only get worse and worse.
But please don’t blame Sir Keir Starmer and his enabler, Rachel Reeves, for the further pain to be announced in October’s Budget. You’ll be reassured to know that none of it is their fault. Not in his wildest dreams did Sir Keir realise just how dire the state of the public finances really were.
I’m not sure what planet Labour could have been living on in believing things were better than they seemed. Ever since the last government spent nearly a fifth of GDP on lockdown, it’s been obvious to all that the nation is up the proverbial without a paddle.
But it’s worse than that, Sir Keir insisted in his abandon-all-hope speech delivered on Tuesday in the gardens of Number 10.