'Handing out public sector pay rises and cutting the winter fuel allowance are not comparable,' says Nigel Nelson
There’s a lot of it about. The tendency to make comparisons which are not comparable. The political equivalent of apples with oranges or pears and pumpkins.
Fuming about a stiff jail sentence for someone spreading hate on social media and a light one for a burglar is not comparing like with like.
The crackdown on online racism is to stop riots being stoked up which, had they continued, could have led to deaths. That’s why sentences are exemplary.
The intrusions of burglars, while always unwelcome, are not likely to have the same effect. The nature of their business is that they go about it stealthily.
You can change a single letter in a word to completely alter its meaning. Cats are not rats. Yet Rishi Sunak seems to think a cat and a rat are the same animal if his attacks on Labour are anything to go by. Those in work are not the same as those who have retired.
But that has not stopped the Leader of the Opposition treating them as one to slam Keir Starmer. Yet handing out public sector pay rises is not in the same basket as taking winter fuel payments away from pensioners. They are not comparable.
I’ll put my cards on the table here. I think Rachel Reeves could have kept the winter fuel allowance and still saved herself money by rolling it into the basic state pension and taxing it.
That way poorer pensioners would have had enough money to keep warm this winter while richer ones would have handed a substantial chunk of it back.
Nurses and teachers got 5.5 per cent hikes because that was what their independent pay review bodies recommended. There’s no point having these bodies if the Government is simply going to ignore them.
And getting antsy about increased pay for train drivers already earning £60,000 a year is not a like for like comparison. Are we saying that anyone on a reasonable wage should never get any more?
But even more bananas is the argument the Chancellor should fill the black hole the Tories left by snaffling the £11.6billion Energy Secretary Ed Miliband is giving away to developing countries to tackle climate change.
This comparison is very definitely odious.
The commitment was made, not by this PM, but by a previous one. Boris Johnson promised the money at the COP26 summit in Glasgow, before the dosh got kicked into the long grass.
As Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, said: “The UK used to be seen as a credible leader on climate change around the world but sadly that has been lost in recent years.”
And Harjeet Singh, global engagement director for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative, added: “As one of the largest historical polluters, the UK bears significant responsibility to contribute its fair share in supporting developing nations.”
This is about geopolitics, not domestic politics. Seeing ourselves as others see us will help us understand why the global south is so grumpy with the global north.
Britain and other industrialised nations made themselves rich on the back of fossil fuels. Now we’re telling developing countries they cannot do the same.
Tory leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick says Britain shouldn’t be stiffed for money because we are responsible for only one per cent of the world’s carbon pollution.
That’s true, but misses the point. Pumping CO2 into the atmosphere is cumulative. We may not be chucking much out now, but during the Industrial Revolution we produced up to 50 per cent of the world’s emissions.
And if you take all the muck that has added to global warming since 1850 the UK is the fourth largest polluter behind the US, China and Russia.
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That’s the other gripe of poorer countries. They’re not the ones who caused climate change and reckon the polluter should pay.
Boris Johnson recognised the moral case for that, even if he and his successors didn’t subsequently do much about it.
There is an international agreement going back to the 2009 UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen that developed countries would provide $100bn annually in climate finance to help developing ones.
Miliband is now honouring that commitment. Our share comes out of the foreign aid budget, not the DWP one Ms Reeves is now raiding.
No one wants to see money taken away from today’s pensioners. But this particular pot is being used to protect the pensioners of tomorrow. And their grandchildren.
