I can understand why Starmer is desperate to show fiscal responsibility by being tough. I can appreciate that in politics it is a tactic for the new regime to pin the blame on an outgoing and discredited government for every painful decision that has to be made. It’s politics. But politics in a democracy has to be tempered with compassion and humanity. Firstly, because it’s the right thing to do. Secondly, if you act in way that that can cause unnecessary suffering and misery to the most vulnerable the electorate will neither forgive nor forget; whatever side of the electoral cycle you are on.

 

Taking money from ten million pensioners who will have to make genuine life challenging decisions on how much they can heat their homes to make a political point is vindictive, malicious and immoral. For a Labour government to do it borders on a mortal sin. Particularly when the choice was helping pensioners or inflation busting pay rises to their cronies in the trade unions. I don’t begrudge junior doctors a pay rise, nor hard pressed station staff, nor anyone on front line services. But the political optics are terrible and the human suffering borders on the wicked.

 

It is easy journalism to say that a week in politics is a long time and this will be chip paper well before the election. I doubt it. It is Labour’s defining moment. Who do they really govern for? The many or the few? We will know tomorrow.

 

Don’t expect a massive Labour vote for the Tory amendment, purely because it is a Tory amendment. The thought of sharing the same air as the One Hundred and Twenty One will be vomit inducing to many. The Tories are still the enemy. They could get round this by tabling their own amendment. But the Speaker would have to call it. Don’t hold your breath.

 

So expect massive abstentions. The Chief Whip demands discipline and will get it. Yet he has a dilemma. He knows that this is an unnecessary, unpopular piece of non manifesto political malarkey which will horribly backfire. His job is to read the room and then work it with a stick and a carrot. Reeves will get a rough ride at the PLP meeting tonight. But Pat McFadden will be there with the a Glasgow kiss.

 

The trouble is that Starmer has no idea how to read a room. He appears to have a limited supply of emotional intelligence. He is just a calculating machine. He calculated that most back benchers want to end the two child cap on child benefit, yet realise it’s an aspiration rather than an expensive commitment. He calculated that David Lammy’s daft, if not illegal arms embargo to Israel would appease the pro Palestinian caucus. But it won’t. It’s window dressing (something like 00.02 % of our arms trade) which discombobulates the Jewish community he has worked so hard to win back & makes us look fools on the international stage. And there will be more.

 

So it’s all about choices, calculations, deals. So nothing new there. But now that the  harsh realities of day to day politics have smacked the the newbies in the face, some of them may begin to wonder why precisely they are serving at Westminster. More importantly whom Even Boris Johnson would have realised that the careless disregard for the plight of pensioners is immoral.

 

Tomorrow will be a defining moment for Labour. If it is not in their DNA to fight for the most vulnerable and weak, what are they for? Most troubling for the party is the throwaway comment by Starmer that pensioners don’t need winter fuel payments. Like Jim Callaghan returning from a world leaders junket abroad to say ‘what crisis’ during the winter of discontent, Starmer didn’t utter the words attributed to him. But like Callaghan it is what he meant. How history repeats itself.

 

Starmer is fortunate that the Tory opposition is a shambles. For now.

If Badenoch faced him every Wednesday at PMQ it would be carnage. I just hope the Tories are hard headed enough to vote for her.

 

So the Starmer honeymoon is over. But it’s not yet time for a divorce.