Keir Starmer’s top team is unapologetic about the cut to the winter fuel payment for millions of pensioners as the party chair warned “we have to get the money from somewhere” on the eve of Labour’s conference in Liverpool.
Rising star in the cabinet Ellie Reeves, who is due to open the conference on Sunday, has insisted the government shouldn’t “paper over the cracks” as she admitted she understood that the party would face a wave of emotion if pensioners die this winter in cold homes.
Her warning, in an exclusive interview with The Independent, comes as Sir Keir prepares to square up again to the left of the party trying to embarrass him by demanding the reversal of the winter fuel cut.
Despite widespread criticism and calls for a U-turn after chancellor Rachel Reeves was given £10bn extra headroom by the Bank of England, her sister Ellie Reeves said that the government is sticking with its plans.
”We could pretend everything is fine and paper over the cracks. But it’s not going to solve any of the country’s problems. That’s why Keir talked about fixing the foundations.
“If you buy a new house and you know it’s rotten in the foundation you don’t just sort of wallpaper the walls, because, you know, in a year, it’s all just going to fall apart. You’ve got to fix the foundations.”
The issue of winter fuel and plight of pensioners is an issue which persists and is expected to dominate the four-day event, with the Unite union – which previously refused to endorse Labour’s election manifesto and supported former leader Jeremy Corbyn – proposing a motion to reverse the cuts.
But Ms Reeves has made it clear that the £22bn black hole left in the public finances by the Tories must be accounted for somehow.
“The decision about winter fuel, it isn’t a position that we wanted to be in. No one wants to be in the position, but you’ve got to make those sorts of choices.
“We saw what happened under the Conservatives when they lost control of the economy. People remember it acutely because they’re still paying more in their mortgages because of it.”
The Labour chair confided that the experience of previous Tory mismanagement in 1992, when the pound crashed on Black Monday, is one of the things which encouraged her and her sister to take a career in politics.
“I can remember my mum at the end of every month getting her credit card bill and having to go through her bank account really, really carefully matching everything up, making sure there was enough left at the end.
“I can remember how interest rates shot through the roof in the early 1990s. There’d be this sort of despair about how to pay the mortgage.”
Ms Reeves is one of Sir Keir’s handpicked lieutenants because of her history in taking on the Corbyn allies in Momentum.
In 2016, after Corbyn won the leadership, Momentum forced her off the ruling National Executive Committee (NEC) in the year she was about to take over as its chair.
Then, after getting elected as an MP in 2017, she faced an attempted deselection by Momentum in her Lewisham West and Penge seat in southeast London in 2019 because of her opposition to controversial figure Chris Williamson being restored to the party.
“There was a backlash from Momentum members in my constituency party. I was pregnant at the time. There was a member that wanted to bring a motion to deselect me and various things like that, so I had to deal with all of that.”
Ms Reeves admits she has become a “face of change” that Sir Keir brought to the Labour Party after the Corbyn years.
But she insisted that there would have been no victory without the change brought under Starmer’s leadership after the “huge, catastrophic defeat” in 2019, when she admits that some in the party were wondering whether it would survive.
