AS widely predicted, the universal fuel payment for Scottish pensioners has gone. The SNP blame Labour, who in turn blame the previous Tory government. It is a circle of blame with only one set of losers – the pensioners. Perhaps we all should simply have voted for the Tories, who might at least have considered the pensioners (who have tendency to actually vote in elections) worth a few hundred pounds to secure their vote.
I understand the cost to the Scottish Government’s budget to sustain the payments would have been around £150 million. Purely by chance, on Wednesday the government also published the GERS figures which show total government expenditure of £111.2 billion in 2023-4. If my calculation is correct, the cost of sustaining the winter fuel payments would amount to 0.134% of this total budget.
READ MORE: Winter Fuel Payments latest as petition against change approaches new milestone
Social Justice Secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville said she had “no choice” after the Chancellor announced cuts south of the Border. This is simply untrue. Politics is all about choices and priorities. Pensioners do not seem to be a priority these days. They are viewed by the state (both UK and Scotland) as a financial burden soon to suffer increased taxation on what little money they may have saved, and in this case be the first to feel the financial axe. Austerity always seems to work from the bottom upwards.
Oddly enough, £77.5m was recently found to increase the pay of council refuse workers at the drop of a proverbial Scottish Government hat. Pensioners are clearly seen as lacking the industrial muscle required to squeeze money from the Scottish Government.
John Baird
Largs
THE Scottish Government has now confirmed it will blindly follow the UK Government in no longer providing winter fuel payments to all pensioners. The UK benefit was due to be replaced by a Holyrood-run alternative but ministers have confirmed it will now be means-tested and the roll-out delayed.
READ MORE: Universal Winter Fuel Payments to be axed in Scotland – find out if you're affected
The Scottish Government gives bus passes and a baby box to people earning well over £100,000 a year but has now chosen to remove winter fuel payments from pensioners receiving a pension of about £12,000 a year. They are spending more than £200 million a year on turning our buses into mobile gang huts and they froze the council tax at a cost of £210m. More than £70m has just been found to pay more to refuse collectors.
They have made very blatant choices to prioritise high earners, young people’s bus passes, council tax freezes and any public service threatening to go on strike, over pensioners.
Glenda Burns
Glasgow
THE headline on the BBC website screams “Scotland scraps universal winter fuel payments for pensioners.”
A balanced report might have referred back to the 2019 report on Poverty and Human Rights in the UK by the UN Rapporteur on Poverty, Philip Alston. In this, he described the approach of the Scottish Government, saying it had “used newly devolved powers to establish a promising social security system, guided by the principles of dignity and social security as a human right and co-designed with claimants on the basis of evidence.” This was in contrast to Alston’s withering criticisms of the UK Government.
READ MORE: Labour would rather see pensioners freeze than raise taxes on rich
A balanced report would have quoted Alston when he went on to say: “Devolved administrations have tried to mitigate the worst impacts of austerity, despite experiencing significant reductions in block grant funding and constitutional limits on their ability to raise revenue. The three devolved administrations all provide welfare funds for emergencies and hardships. But mitigation comes at a price, and is not sustainable. The Scottish Government said it had reached the limit of what it can afford to mitigate, because every pound spent on offsetting cuts means reducing vital services.”
What was true five years ago is even more true now. Moreover, recent decisions by the Labour government on winter fuel payments and the two-child cap show that it makes no difference whether the Scottish Government is dealing with a Labour or Conservative government at Westminster.
None of us, however, expect any balanced reporting from the BBC. Alston, on the other hand, who had no axe to grind, did produce a balanced report.
Gavin Brown
Linlithgow
IN the 1950s we innocent students danced the quickstep to a lively tune called Muskrat Ramble. Today, the planet has become a dance floor. Half the world is dancing to the same tune but it’s no longer a ramble. The tempo is rising and the tune is being played by a one-man band on all our financial, political, social and networking systems.
Oh for the days of Jimmy Shand and a good old Scottish waltz country dance. Let it be called Independence.
Iain R Thomson
Strathglass
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