"No legal requirement to do one"

Keir Starmer's merciless excuse for failing to carry out an impact assessment on the confiscation of Winter Fuel Allowance from millions of pensioners.

Keir Starmer has admitted that Labour failed to carry out any kind of impact assessment on his decision to confiscate Winter Fuel Allowance from millions of pensioners living on as little as £11,000 per year.

Any decent government would have attempted to investigate how many excess deaths such a policy was likely to cause, and what extra strains it would cause in other areas of government policy, especially on the already over-stretched NHS.

A well conceived impact assessment would also have considered important variables too, like how the negative consequences would be exacerbated if Labour were to allow profiteering energy companies to dramatically hike their prices at the same time as confiscating the winter fuel payment (as Starmer has done).

Labour’s decision not to bother with an impact assessment illustrates the same robotic inhumanity of austerity-addled politicians that we witnessed over and again from the Tories.

Starmer has made it clear that his version of Labour cares so little about the people that they govern, that they can’t even be bothered to estimate how many of them will get sick and die as a result of their myopic short-term book balancing policies.

This unwillingness to even estimate the size of the body pile reflects extremely poorly on the 348 Labour MPs who followed Starmer’s orders to vote the policy through parliament.

These people were well aware that they’d be frozen out of power within the Labour ranks if they refused to follow orders, but they couldn’t even be bothered to ask how many pensioners would be frozen to death as a result of their obediently following orders.

They chose their own career advancement over the welfare of pensioners.

But perhaps the most infuriating aspect of this scandalous disregard for the consequences is Starmer’s excuse that there was "no legal requirement to do one".

If Labour really wanted to deliver the "change" that Starmer promised during the election campaign, creation of a legal requirement to actually investigate the real life consequences of government spending decisions would have been a fantastic way of preventing governments from destroying citizens’ lives with impunity as we saw so often from the Tories over the preceding fourteen years.

Instead we’re faced with Starmer callously insisting that it’s fine and proper that he couldn’t even be bothered to estimate the death toll, because there was no legal obligation for him to do so!

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