The UK is still suffering from the economic crisis triggered by the greed and criminal ineptitude of American bankers and their European acolytes. It's only reasonable that all its citizens, apart from the most vulnerable, should bear their part of the consequent economic pain. And that includes pensioners. I would have no objection to Osborne withdrawing the winter fuel allowance from those of us whose annual family income is above the national median. What sticks in the craw is his cynical exploitation of the ignorance of the average voter. Believing the continent to be bathed in perpetual sunshine, 365 days a year, most of the electorate regard withdrawing the fuel allowance for pensioners living abroad as long overdue. Sky News interviewed a councillor from Teignmouth who claimed that his elderly parents living in Madrid had told him they didn't need the allowance because "It's always warm here." Maybe they are suffering from senile dementia: every independent weather channel I've been able to find states that in winter Madrid's temperature hits freezing, frequently becoming cold enough to support snowfall.
Even worse, The Daily Mash and NewsThump two purportedly satirical websites, posted articles not only supporting Osborne's position but, in the case of The Daily Mash, seeing it as a self-evident truth.
NewsThump sells tee-shirts emblazoned with the legend "I think, therefore I am not a Daily Mail reader", thus unwittingly demonstrating that, although satire may be dead, inadvertent self-satire is not.
I sent a letter to the Guardian:
I am a retired English lecturer living two and a half thousand feet above sea level in central Italy. Every winter we experience prolonged and heavy snow-falls. Electricity in Italy costs roughly twice as much as it does in the UK where I spent all of my working life. I pay UK tax on my modest pension.
Although I will lose my winter fuel allowance in 2015, I draw comfort from the fact that once he's sixty, if he's living in the UK, Fred Goodwin will be able to claim the benefit, supplementing the £342,500 a year pension my taxes help to pay for.
It wan't published.
All of which shows Osborne's political nous. He could have saved money by removing the allowance from pensioners whose income was above a certain level. But that would have lent credence to the dangerous idea that the economic cuts should impinge on an individual in proportion to his means. That there was something unjust about the average joe having his modest salary frozen while the median total remuneration of FTSE 100 bosses rose by 8 per cent to £3.7 million. Instead the Chancellor played his Queen of Diamonds: the 'Europe' word. Instantly tens of millions of seemingly normal British citizens were turned into Manchurian Candidates, deprived of rational thought as, frothing at the mouth, they denounced the ex-pats sheltering in the bosom of the Anti-Christ's eurozone.
"Good boy, George. Job done," said the global financier, patting Osborne on the shoulder, before climbing aboard his limousine and disappearing into the distant shadows.
