Coffee House Shots
Will Rachel Reeves soften the winter fuel cut?
Subscribe to the spectator in September and get three months of website and app access absolutely free. Follow the Tory leadership campaign, Labour's inaugural budget and the US elections with Britain's best informed journalists and get your first three months free, only in September. Go to www.spectator.co.uk/sale24. Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm James Hill and I'm joined today by Katie Balles and Fraser Nelson. Katie momento is growing behind the rebellion on Winter Fuel Allowance. The numbers reported in the Guardian today as being up to 50 MPs prepared to vote against the Labour Whip on this. Tell us where we stand ahead of the vote on Tuesday afternoon. So you've had Liz Candel, the work of pension secretary, calling around MPs, aside from reported Rachel Reeves was meeting with MPs last week to try and explain to them effectively why she thinks she needs to do this cut and to put it into the context with the wider economic picture, which she's saying is pretty difficult. And I think the sense that this is one difficult decision but there's more coming in the budget and then actually the spending review next Easter is probably going to be perhaps the most uncomfortable them all given there's 19 billion pounds of cuts already priced into that. So I think there's a general effort from the government to try and bring MPs on the side while also trying to make clear that perhaps this is just a taste of things to come. Not the most appetizing message to land but of course as you say the rebellion is heating up because you have the TUC so the trade union conference this week and the unions have started to come out and say this is a cruel cut. Kids tell me you need to change calls. Kids tell me it's giving a speech at the TUC so you can imagine some of the unions and they're just really trying to press that point to him when he is when he is there. And then you have an early day motion last week with some new Labour MPs on it who designed it saying you know suggesting a rethink. Is Rachel Reeves about to have a rethink? Well she's appearing before the PLP later today in the weekly Monday meeting the Labour party has so clearly is going to have a message from them. You can expect a few tricky questions I would imagine and what follows and what some Labour MPs would like is there is some of course calling for a full U-turn. At that point I think that'd be pretty difficult for Rachel Reeves. I don't think it's what she wants to do. I don't think it's what number 10 wants to do. Look at Kia Starmer's interview on Sunday saying we are going to have to be unpopular on some things and Winter Fuel is one of them. The trying to prepare the party for a tough year and getting back into the rhythm of governments come in make unpopular decisions in the first year and then try and do nice enough things to soften it before you get to an election in four or five years time. So could there be, you know, you already have the hardship fund. Could there be some more levers they could pull to soften it? That's a question mark. But I think the general mood coming from number 10, number 11, is they are pressing on with this and therefore the question becomes if you have, say, around 50 MPs who might rebel, of course, there's voting against it, there's being mysteriously busy and abstaining, which is obviously the softer way of doing it. When you had the two-child benefit gap and it is no coincidence that it's welfare where you tend to have the largest Labour-backed bench rebellions, when you had the two-child benefit row, they managed to get that down to a really small number of Labour MPs, but also said, the whip said, you know, on the day, if you vote against this, you will lose a whip and they lost the whip allegedly it's for three months. We'll see how that goes. Could they do the same thing in this vote? Kia Starmer didn't roll it out on Sunday, but of course you can't really do it if you have 50 MPs rebelling because to strip the whip from 50 of your MPs, even if you're a large party, so early on, it's just, I think, going to be too problematic. Can you use a threat of that to reduce the number to the point that, you know, another eight go? I suspect they'll be trying to find another means because I just don't think it's particularly functional, even though Kia Starmer has a large majority, to have a situation where every time those are a rebellion, people lose the whip. You can try and do it, but this should be the bit that you have the most good world to label leader, and it's going to start to catch up with you. It was striking, I think, this morning on the media round when Home Office Minister Donna Johnson suggested that the Treasury was looking at ways to soften the impact of that allowance cut, and then, of course, had to be corrected subsequently by government sources. I was afraid, did you think Labour and Peter are ready for this and the tough decisions that come ahead, given, as we know, that Labour has traditionally been more party of the largest state in the public sector, are they prepared for the hardship that's coming from this winter and in future ones? No, I think that's what we can see all over this debate. Rachel Reeves wasn't prepared for the way this proposal landed. She just, I suspect, took it straight from the Treasury suggestion sheet without really thinking about the politics. Then you can see that to the question, why isn't it means tested? If you were to give it a more sophisticated means test, that would cost a lot of money, and it would sort of obviate the economic point of the cut in the first place, which means you're left with a very crude system where you give it to the pensioners claiming pension credit, but not to anybody else, which means huge kind of cliff edge drop-offs for people in certain income and brackets. This is the dilemma of government. This is what Tories have been used to for 13 years. This is why this is why oppositions demand simple solutions, and governments can't do them, simply because the solutions are very difficult, and Labour isn't used to this language. They are now having to rise to the altitude of government, and we'll have to learn the vocabulary, because that'll go for the backbenchers as well, who have to explain to their own constituents, to their own voters, why it is that Labour government should be making a cut, which will. I mean, of course, I'd be making a big thing about how a quarter of pensioners live in millionaire households and absolutely don't deserve it, but that's not to say there are people right at the other end of that spectrum, not quite poor enough to qualify for the credit, but certainly not rich enough whereby this won't make a serious impact to their finances. The blunt truth is a government is a blunt tool. In my view, it shouldn't be. I think a lot more should be done for governments to try to understand who gets welfare. I remember when Rishi Sunak was giving away the energy subsidies. He was absolutely stunned to find out, but a third of this country is in receipt of government welfare one way or another. Now, I was struck by the fact that he was struck. You'd think the Prime Minister might know something fairly basic, like who's getting welfare in this country, or how big is the welfare state become? And this, of course, raises really important questions of what's the welfare state for. We can see this at the heart of this debate as well. Some are saying, yes, we believe in universal benefits, because that means if you give it to everybody, that means you'll be sure to give it to those who need it. Now, I would argue against universal benefits, I think that morally there's no case for giving welfare to rich people who don't need it, and those resources are better targeted at the poor who do. But then you're getting, again, a fundamental question about the nature of government. Who is it for? Who is welfare for? Should labor be the party of universal benefits or not? And labor simply isn't ready for this. It hasn't rehearsed these things. It doesn't know how to have this conversation. So through the agony of Rachael Reeves' positions, through the confusion we can hear and Diana Johnson's interview today, and that of other labor ministers put on the spot over this, we can hear a party trying to work out for language of government. And elsewhere, there's been reports about what happened in the first ballot of the Conservative MPs in the ongoing four-month leadership contest. Gave you ahead of tomorrow's ballot Tuesday afternoon, in which five will become four. What do you think Tory MPs are saying about what happened last week in the contest? There's been some accusations of vote lending going on, particularly allegedly from Robert Generix's camp to try and knock out Pretty Patel in that first ballot. I think there's always these type of allegations in any Tory leadership contest. And boy, have we had a couple in recent years, because you just don't know where the votes are going. And if you are on a campaign team with sufficient support, you might start to try and be a little bit clever and move some of your supporters in certain directions. It's obviously more complicated to do when you have lots of horses in the race. So it could be the case that Robert Generix's team wanted to make it look as though James cleverly had more momentum than Cammie Badernock, because now we're all saying, can Cammie Badernock make it to the final two? But at the same time, I think I've written and others have written for some time that Cammie Badernock could struggle to make it to the final two. That's not about the dark arts of Robert Generix's campaign team. Perhaps it's a factor. It's more because Cammie Badernock has always had one of her weaknesses is bringing MPs on-side. And therefore, that was a bit of a red flag, which is if she can make it to the final two, really good chance. If she can't, that is probably because she has not been doing as much reach out work. She probably has some really ardent supporters, but she's also got some hardcore critics because they have found her rude over the years. Now, what does she do about bringing them back on-side is not necessarily clear that over the summer, they've been working in quite the way that I think some of the other campaign teams are to bring over those MPs. So she could still make the final two, of course. But I think you can't blame your problems all on what this team did in that, because even if, say, a team has had enough MP backers that they can tell them to vote for other people, your team has still failed to get those MPs to back you. How do you want that blame game to shake out? I think where it gets interesting, and also pretty Patel, what was significant about the round we just had was the first chance for any campaign team to show they had been mentored. So even though some campaign teams that were thinking, well, we get to the final four and that's all that matters, it was such an important batter because it gave you a sense of play. And the problem that Tom Tegan has had, for example, is because James Clavoli looks further ahead. Lots of people are now saying, well, actually, James Clavoli's more of the candidate in the centre than Tom of the backers. And that's quite hard to come back from. It's not impossible. And I wasn't surprised when Pretty Patel was knocked out because I think there was a sense that she was struggling to get backers. And Malstride, I thought one of the two would be, I thought probably Malstride the second week. The numbers were so close. Now I think probably Malstride's knocked out, but it is conceivable that Tom Tegan had could be. Cammie Baidnock needs to bring more MPs with her. But I think her best, there's always a chance there's going to be more of this, particularly when you get to the final four, which link that down to two. That's when I think you're probably going to see the biggest effort to say, you speak to those who worked on the Boris Johnson camp. They obviously wanted to go against Jeremy Hunt in the final two. And I think that there were ways to do that. Similarly, I think that Rishi Sunak saw his best bet. He had the most MPs initially was to go against Liz Truss in the hopes she might blow up. Unfortunately for Rishi, she blew up after she had become prime minister, not before it. But I think they were more scared about going for Penny Morden. So this stuff is not technically against the rules. It's how politics works. I suspect there will be some more of it. But I think it comes back to the teams themselves, too. He can't beat the system. Join her. So based on that supposition, then a phrase of the allegations that they were lending votes. I mean, who would be the weakest candidate for Robert Generic, who if you wanted to face in the final two, who would he stand the best chance against beating? It's difficult to say really, but Malstride probably. All right. I don't know. I understand on you, Garth Parle. Look, in my opinion, Robert Generate could be anybody other than Kami. So it doesn't really matter who they send up against him. If the members do want to rig it in that way. On Thursday, I was at Rundell in South Downs, speaking to their activists. That's they collectively managed to get the biggest conservative majority in the country. The biggest is Rishi Sunak's. So I went to, but I was very interested to learn how they did it. And they are quite becoming better supporters, but they were asking me, could it be that the MPs will rig it? Could it be that they, even though coming back is the number one, activists candidate has reflected in the view of Paul of Tory candidates, the conservative home polls, could the MPs conspire not to give us that choice? And I didn't have an answer to that. All I was able to say is that the Tory MPs are the world's most untrustworthy electorate, in terms that they'll never honest with anybody who they're actually voting for, and they will vote in various complicated ways. So it's quite possible, but it would be quite daring, shall I say, if the MPs to do that, if the polls continue to show that Badenuk is ahead by quite some margin amongst members, to then not give members the chance to vote would be quite a sort of statement. And I came away from Rundell in South Downs' struck at just how much hostility there seemed to be amongst these activists to Tory HQ. They seem to regard it as a kind of bungling place where they're sending down nincompoops to be the candidates. I spoke to a selector there who was saying that there are so many good qualified experienced people who want to be Tory MPs, but they're always basically being eased out of the picture by a kind of croniest Tory HQ that wants to get various special advisors a seat. So again, I'm not an expert on the mechanics of Tory selection, but when my trip down there was able to give me some flavour of what activists are feeling. Do you think the best card to carry Badenuk has to play is Tory party conference, as she can get to the final fall, which I would work on the assumption she will comfortably get to the final fall. If she doesn't, then I am ready to do 10 minutes on dark hours, because that would truly be a surprise and votes being lent, and something strange will have happened. But there, if she can, you know, given the Tory grassroots be there in some form, not all of them, I think if you clearly from that event show visually, physically, in terms of what is happening there, that you have by far the most momentum and virtue against a Tory base, it gets not harder for all these Tory MPs to organise themselves to deprive the membership by having a say of their preferred candidate. So that's really what her team and she will need to focus on. Thank you, JT, thank you, Fraser, and thank you for listening to Kofi Arshon's. [MUSIC PLAYING]