The Less-Than Magnificent Seven - The Starmerite Pensioners Who Voted to Freeze The Old...

Back in 2011, there was horror amongst the Labour benches in the House of Commons over Tory plans to reduce pensioners' Winter Fuel Payment by £50 or £100 a year, wiping out a temporary increase introduced by the previous Labour government. Things aren't quite the same in 2024...

There was a DUP-introduced debate in Parliament in November 2011 on the planned cuts to Winter Fuel Payments - the Tories planned to reduce the amount of the allowance, not, it should be noted, to take it away completely. All seven of the 'Labour' MPs pictured on the left (hah!) of this picture voted against the planned cuts - the idea was unthinkable!

Graham Stringer, Alan Campbell, Fabian Hamilton, Stephen Timms, Nic Dakin, Nia Griffith, Mary Glindon - to a man (or woman) they staunchly cast their votes in favour of not cutting the vital allowance. What a difference 13 years makes...

Thirteen years later, all seven ARE pensioners; you'd imagine their disgust at the idea to be even more entrenched. After all, it means they will themselves be among those who lose the Winter Fuel Payment! Not, of course, that it matters to any of them - YOU pay their bills...

But oddly enough, all those years - and doubtless all those expenses and donations - have made them 'look at things a bit differently'.

Thirteen years later, their 'opinions' have, apparently, changed just a tad. Each and every one of the seven who were horrified back then at the idea of pensioners' Winter Fuel Payments being reduced a bit just voted to allow millions of elderly people to get no WFA at all, despite skyrocketing fuel bills and a severe winter being predicted.

They have other similarities too, the Less-Than-Magnificent Seven; YOU pay their bills. In most cases, that includes household bills like energy - unless of course you're Graham Stringer, who doesn't claim his household bills - but you have shelled out around £65,000 in the last 5 years alone to cover his stays in cushy London hotels (which he has done every year since at least 2010 - incidentally, you also pay his stepdaughter Eleanor up to £35,000 a year as a 'parliamentary assistant - whether you pay her hotel bills too isn't clear)

The 'Labour' pensioners aren't the only hypocrites in Starmer's government, mind you - his Secretary of State for Scotland, the odious Ian Murray MP, was very outspoken about cuts to Winter Fuel Payments in 2011. Needless to say, he obediently obeyed his master's voice and fell into line this time

Scottish 'Labour' leader Anas Sarwar didn't seem so keen on cutting WFA as a Labour MP in 2011, either...

Of course you don't have to be a Labour veteran to develop a sudden indifference to freezing pensioners - the odious new Crawley 'Labour' MP Peter Lamb (a product of the David Evans' stable, incidentally) recently caused an uproar after asserting that it was pensioners' 'choice' whether or not to put the heating on in their homes. A choice presumably to be made by the 13,058 pensioners living in his constituency...

As Starmer's 'Labour' heads toward its Conference in Liverpool this weekend, doubtless the thousands planning to protest against his thus far pathetic performance as Prime Minister will be raising the issue - and many, many others, with him and his frontbenchers...