The Coalition is to hit out at millions of pensioners.
Currently anyone over 60 is eligible for the winter fuel allowance, with households getting £250, and pensioners aged over 80 able to claim £400 per household.
As part of a £14bn cuts package, the October spending review will raise the age of receipt of winter fuel to 66, and then to 70, in two jumps, while the amount received will be cut by £50 for new starters and £100 for those already receiving payment.
This decision to freeze the pensioners, added to the prospect of another very cold winter, will be a death sentence for thousands of pensioners who will freeze throughout the winter, an experience that will either shorten their lives or kill them outright.
Already thousands of pensioners die in the winter because they cannot afford to run up huge fuel bills.
This new state attack, constitutes the grievous bodily harm of, and murder of the elderly. It is to take place so that the Tory LibDem coalition can make a start in balancing its books, now showing hundreds of billions of debt, caused by the financial, and economic collapse of the bankers’ and bosses’ capitalist system.
Even Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary Yvette Cooper had to say yesterday: ‘Winter fuel payments help many pensioners across the country. David Cameron has promised time and again that the Tories would protect them.
‘But today we hear the work and pensions secretary is planning to cut this support that so many pensioners depend on. This is a shocking betrayal of pensioners.’
It is a fact that Cameron is directly betraying a pre- general election promise to safeguard benefits for the elderly, including winter fuel payments.
The latest proposals come after earlier this month the Tory LibDem coalition published its plans to raise the state pension age for women to 66 by 2019.
Eligibility for winter fuel allowance is to follow the pensionable age upwards from 62 for women to 70 for all and beyond!
Already Tories and Liberals are suggesting that only those aged 75 and over should receive winter fuel payments!
In fact there are already half serious jests being made up and down the country that the Coalition will soon be thinking the unthinkable about the elderly, and be making the case for euthanasia at 70 for the workers and the middle class and so rid the bosses and the bankers of the pensioner problem for all time.
It is now crystal clear that the kind of equality the Coalition intends for the working class and the middle class is the equality of universal pauperism.
There are to be no permanent council house tenants, only part time, and no full-time workers, no sickness or disability benefits, no NHS free at the point of need, and no state services, only charitable soup kitchens.
It will be back to the 19th century with charities given the task of dealing with mass poverty and with young people, who are the future, not having a future at all.
This is the vision that is inspiring the new Victorian workhouse masters, Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Duncan Smith.
The working class must not only say no, it must make sure that the forthcoming TUC Congress calls a general strike to bring down the coalition and bring in a workers government.
