Winter fuel cuts could be Starmer's poll tax moment, warns Diane Abbott

Telegraph

21-05-2025

Sir Keir Starmer's winter fuel raid risks becoming his poll tax moment, Diane Abbott has warned.
The veteran Labour MP said the decision to remove the benefit from 10 million pensioners could prove as politically damaging as Margaret Thatcher's most controversial policy.
It comes as Sir Keir faces a potential rebellion from more than 100 of his own backbenchers over separate cuts to the welfare budget.
The poll tax was a forebear of council tax and proved catastrophic for Thatcher, sparking widespread rioting as well as dissent from her own cabinet ministers.
Ms Abbott, the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, said in an interview on Wednesday that the winter fuel cuts introduced by Sir Keir and Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, could not be justified.
She told ITV's Good Morning Britain: 'Everybody knows an old person, people think of old people as a vulnerable group, and it just wasn't worth it for the money that Rachel got out of it.'
She added: 'I don't know you if you remember the poll tax with Mrs Thatcher. Mrs Thatcher did a lot of things which people didn't like but it's the poll tax that upset people.'
Asked whether the winter fuel raid amounted to Sir Keir's own poll tax, she replied: 'It could be Keir Starmer's poll tax. And, you know, [Thatcher] tried to drive through the poll tax and she was gone within the year.'
Pressed on whether the political damage had already been done, she replied: 'I think in some ways the damage has already been done.'
Senior Labour figures have acknowledged the unpopularity of the winter fuel raid but insisted that the Chancellor had to take difficult decisions.
Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, admitted the policy cost Labour support in this month's Runcorn and Helsby by-election, which the party lost to Reform UK by six votes.
Earlier this week, Ms Reeves appeared to open the door to reversing the controversial cuts, although Treasury sources later insisted that the current policy stands.
The Telegraph understands that about 100 Labour MPs have put their name to a letter saying they cannot support the separate welfare reforms being pushed by Sir Keir and his Chancellor in their current form.
Ms Abbott, one of the most prominent figures on the Left of the Labour Party, went on to suggest Sir Keir did not appear to believe in anything.
'He's done quite well with international stuff but basically he's a manager rather than a politician,' she said.
'And he's very good at being a manager but being a politician has got to be something else. And it doesn't seem quite to have the 'something else'. I could be wrong.'
Noting that Sir Keir had only joined the party in 2014, she continued: 'He was director of public prosecutions, and then the next year he became an MP.
'So he hasn't come through the Labour movement and maybe that's why he doesn't appear to have a set of beliefs.'
Sir Keir's recent crackdown on immigration, widely seen as a response to the rise of Reform, has prompted further criticism from Left-wing MPs such as Ms Abbott.
Much of this has been focused on a speech in which the Prime Minister said recent levels of net migration were unsustainable and that Britain risked becoming an 'island of strangers'.
Ms Abbott said the remarks had proven highly damaging for Sir Keir, arguing that while immigration was an issue his use of language had not been appropriate.
She went on to claim it was 'very, very unwise' for Labour to attempt to 'steal Reform's clothes' as Sir Keir seeks to win over voters who have fallen in behind Nigel Farage's party.
'If you like Reform's type of hardline, anti-immigrant policies, you're going to vote Reform,' she said. 'Why are you going to vote for a second-rate copy?'