Whatever happened to Sir Keir Starmer’s promise to tread more lightly on our lives? - Andrew Vine

Doesn’t feel like we’re being treated respectfully and trodden lightly on, does it?

More like regarded with scorn and stamped on, particularly if you’re elderly or part of a farming family.

And as for not being dogmatic, on the contrary Sir Keir and his senior colleagues are developing a habit of stubbornness for its own sake by sticking to badly thought-through policies when common sense and compassion demand a rethink.

The most glaring of these is the stripping of winter fuel payments from millions of older people, who during last week’s cold snap had a bone-chilling foretaste of what the months ahead might hold.

As Yorkshire saw its first snow of the winter, and night-time temperatures sank below freezing, the government’s own figures revealed that up to 150,000 older people will be plunged into poverty by the loss of the extra money to pay for heating.

It’s impossible to know how many older folk in our county shivered through last week, afraid to switch their heating on because of the cost of gas and electricity.

Prices increased only a month before the snow and ice arrived and will go up again in January.

That pensioners should be burdened with worry about heating bills after a lifetime of work and paying their taxes is a disgrace.

And beyond the 150,000 who are officially classified as likely to be in poverty, there will be millions more who suffer real hardship, facing the awful choice between paying to stay warm or having enough to eat.

That isn’t treading lightly on their lives. That’s throwing their lives into turmoil with a mean-spirited and possibly counter-productive measure that could put even more pressure on the NHS if older people end up in hospital as a consequence of being cold.

Before and since the election, one of Labour’s most familiar lines is that those with the broadest shoulders will have to pay more to fix the country’s financial problems.

Pensioners on very modest fixed incomes freezing at home and fearing the bills at a point when inflation is once again rising cannot possibly be considered as those with the broadest shoulders, but they are being hit financially far harder than any other group.

Yet the government is insistent it will not reinstate the winter payments, even though it acknowledges its own actions are going to leave a huge number of people in financial crisis. If that’s not dogmatic, I don’t know what is.

So too with the farm tax, which the Prime Minister insists will not be reversed, even though all the evidence points to this ill-conceived measure ruining farming families.

Forcing them out of agriculture after generations by imposing punitive levels of inheritance tax is about as far as it is possible to get from treading lightly on their lives, let alone treating them with respect.

How far adrift Sir Keir’s rhetoric on taking office is proving to be from the reality of how his government is operating was thrown into sharp relief by the death last week of John Prescott, the former deputy prime minister and long-serving Hull MP.

It is absolutely inconceivable that when in power he would have countenanced deliberately making millions of pensioners poorer, and then insisting it was the right course of action while 150,000 descended into poverty.

Help for older people, not a policy that brought them hardship, would have been Lord Prescott’s instinct.

Nor would he have jeopardised the future of family farms. His concern for the welfare of agriculture, and appreciation of how vital it is to Britain, was demonstrated by his central role in the response of the government to the foot and mouth crisis of 2001 when farmers were at risk of being bankrupted as their livestock were destroyed to stop the disease spreading.

Sir Keir and his colleagues would do well to glance over their shoulders to the period of government in which John Prescott played such an important part, and learn some lessons about running the country without making victims of pensioners and farmers.

Only a few months into office, the pledges made in Downing Street about how Labour would govern are not ringing true.