Yesterday people were expecting the vote on the winter fuel payments cut to happen today. Now it looks like it will be on Wednesday. But no one has said for sure, and in an interview with LBC Rachel Reeves said even she did not know.
Asked if the vote had been moved to Wednesday because Labour was “running scared of this vote taking place prior to the prime minister’s address [on Tuesday afternon]”, Reeves replied:
I don’t know the situation about when votes take place, but if delegates want to vote on this, they will get a vote on this.
I don’t know the timing of the vote, but we’ve already had a vote in parliament where it was overwhelmingly passed.
This isn’t the decision that I wanted to make. It wasn’t a decision that I expected to make, but given the state of the public finances that I inherited, I think it was right to restrict the winter fuel payment to the poorest pensioners, and to make sure that all of the pensioners entitled to it are getting it.
an article from Reeves, which said more or less the same thing, but with slightly different language.
The Daily Telegraph today is splashing on a story saying Reeves is delivering a message of pessimism.
But the Times is saying the opposite.
Both interpretations are defensible, although the Times’s is more in line with the message Reeves wants people to take away from the speech. At the Guardian we avoided this choice by focusing on a different aspect of the speech – Reeves’ confirmation that she will appoint a Covid corruption commissioner to recover money lost because of dodgy PPE contracts.
In interviews this morning Reeves has been focusing on the optimism. On BBC Breakfast, defending her decision to cut winter fuel payments, she said:
I think it’s important to level with people about what governments have to do to get a grip of the public finances.
But, by getting that grip, by bringing stability back to our economy, because we have been plagued by chaos and instability these last few years, along with the reforms we are making – reforming the planning system to get Britain building, creating a national wealth fund to support homegrown industries and jobs here in Britain, reforming the pension system to unlock money for startup and scale up businesses and get better returns for pension savers – if we can do these things, I know that the prize on offer is immense: more money in people’s pockets, more good jobs paying decent wages, more money to invest in our front line public services, particularly our national health service.
So stability, combined with the reform to get Britain building and get Britain growing, is the prize that is on offer for governments that are willing to take the decisions to get our economy on a firmer footing.
And she was even more positive in the Times article.
None of this will come easy. I would be doing a disservice to the British people if I did or said otherwise. However, I have never been more optimistic about our country’s fortunes. Britain lost confidence in the Conservative party, but it has never lost confidence in itself. The prize on offer is immense. The future has never had so much potential. It now falls on all of us to seize it.
But will that be enough? In their Guardian splash, Kiran Stacey and Peter Walker quote a minister saying, in private, the government has not done enough to explain what the bright future it wants to create will look like. They report:
One minister said the party had spent too much time in government talking about its inheritance and not enough about what it will do with power.
“There’s a sense that there has been a bit much blaming the inheritance and not enough of anything else,” they said. “It’s all very well to say we need to fix the foundations, but people also want to know what the house will look like at the end of it all.”
Will the minister ever find out what the house will look like? On the basis of Reeves’ interviews so far, they will be none the wiser, but we might learn more from the speech.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9.15am: The conference opens.
9.30am: John Healey, the defence secretary, opens a “Britain Reconnected” debate
10am: Bev Craig, the leader of Manchester city council, and Richard Parker, the West Midlands mayor, speak.
11.50am: Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, speaks.
Noon: Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, gives her speech.
1.45pm: Conference reconvenes after lunch. Peter Kyle, the science secretary, opens a session on “Growth for Higher Living Standards”, followed by Louise Haigh, the transport secretary, at 1.50pm.
2.50pm: Ian Murray, the Scottish secretary, and Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, speak in a session on Scotland.
3pm: Eluned Morgan, the Welsh first minister, and Jo Stevens, the Welsh secretary, speak in a session on Wales.
3.10pm: Hilary Benn, the Northern Ireland secretary, speaks.
3.15pm: Steve Reed, the environment secretary, opens a session on the clean energy mission, followed by Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, at 3.25pm.
4.30pm: Wes Streeting, the health secretary, speaks at an ‘in conversation’ event at a fringe meeting run by the Institute for Government thinktank.
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Source: theguardian.com
