The UK’s prime minister appears not to know the dangers of speaking without thinking, because Keir Starmer may have just exposed his own NHS lie.

He has said that he had to take the Winter Fuel Allowance from 10 million pensioners in order to save the NHS, implying that the money saved (£1.5 billion) would go towards healthcare.

But he has also said that the NHS will get no more money without reform.

The latter seems more likely to be true, because Starmer’s Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has been saying she needs to cut the winter fuel payments in order to help fill a £22 billion “black hole” in the public finances that she could clear just as easily by imposing a one per cent wealth tax on the wealthiest one per cent of UK citizens, who won’t miss the money.

You can read more about Starmer’s apparent lie here.

Additionally, taking winter fuel payments from pensioners is likely to place extra strain on the NHS, for obvious reasons as senior citizens struggle to choose between heating and eating over the winter.

So in fact, by taking the money away, Starmer is jeopardising the NHS – not saving it.

He would have known all about this if he had commissioned an impact assessment, but he says he has not done so because there was “no legal requirement for it”.

As Another Angry Voice states,

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).

The article goes on to suggest that Starmer’s government could have created a legal requirement to assess the impact of government changes to citizen income, to be applied not just to this policy but to all of them. This is true and would be useful.

But of course governments don’t have to avoid conducting impact assessments just because there’s “no legal requirement”. Labour could have done one anyway.

When government ministers – or prime ministers – hide behind the “no legal requirement” argument, they are only advertising their own heartlessness, cowardice, and incompetence.

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