Labour offered easy answers in Opposition but as winter fuel payments cut shows, there’s no such thing in Government - Bill Carmichael

Of course, that is undoubtedly true. But Mr Reynold’s complaint would carry more weight if Labour hadn’t been offering “easy answers” to intractable problems for the last 14 years.

All we had to do was to tax the rich a tiny bit more, we were told, and all our financial troubles would be over. Indeed, that is precisely what the General Secretary of the Unite union, Sharon Graham, said on another radio interview this week.

She claimed a 1 per cent tax on the richest 1 per cent would raise a whopping £25bn a year - more than enough to fill the £22bn “black hole” with lots of money left over.

She asked: “Why are Labour picking the pockets of pensioners on winter fuel payments instead of making those with the broadest shoulders actually pay?”

Fair point? It all sounds so easy and straightforward that it is a real puzzle to understand why nobody has ever thought of it before?

Well, they have, and the truth is that wealth taxes don’t really work, and are certainly no magic bullet for wrecked public finances.

Many European countries, including Norway, Spain, France and Italy, have tried to impose some kind of wealth tax, and none of them have produced anything remotely like £25bn a year.

The problem is that the rich are the most mobile sector of the population, and if the government’s tax squeeze gets too tight, it is a simple matter for them to relocate to a more friendly tax jurisdiction where they will be welcomed with open arms.

And if that happens, of course, it means they pay precisely nothing to the British exchequer. In fact there is a distinct possibility that wealth taxes would result in the government’s tax take going down instead of up, and there would be less money available for public services.

This bleak reality is beginning to dawn on the new government, and they are desperately casting around for somebody else to blame - hence pointing the finger at the Conservatives for leaving the legendary £22bn “black hole” in the public purse.

The trouble is that this “black hole” is at least partly of the new government’s own making. For example, getting on for half of the £22bn is the result of inflation-busting pay rises the government has lavished on its friends in the public sector.

The government likes to pretend this is all driven by economic imperatives, but this is nonsense. These are political choices, and Labour has to own them.

For example, the ministers could have easily shaved a few percentage points from these extravagantly generous public sector pay deals, for example from the £70,000 a year deal handed to train drivers, and this would have produced more than enough money to maintain the winter fuel allowance.

But they decided that placating the militant public sector unions who bankroll Labour was far more important than keeping pensioners warm and alive this winter. That’s a political decision, not an economic imperative.

And let’s be absolutely candid here, the result of this decision is that some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society will die because they will be unable to heat their homes adequately.

This isn’t conjecture. We know this because research produced before the 2017 General Election showed that there would be an increase in excess winter deaths of 3,850 if the winter fuel allowance was cut.

When the then Prime Minister Theresa May floated the idea, the authors of the research called it “the single biggest attack on pensioners in a generation in our country”.

And guess who was responsible for this research? You guessed it - the Labour party.

As the government is beginning to discover, governing a country is hard. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said this week he is prepared to become unpopular by making some tough decisions.

That is fair enough. But the choices his government makes have real world consequences. And we should never let Labour MPs forget, when winter bites and poor pensioners are dropping like flies in their freezing homes, that this is exactly what they voted for.