With fiscal discipline the order of the day, the Party is unlikely to repeat it’s commitment to handing £billions to pensioners, says Morgan Jones
In November 2019, with the general election campaign already well underway, Labour announced that, if elected, it would pay compensation to Waspi women, at a cost estimated to be as much as £56bn over five years. The pledge hadn’t featured in the party’s manifesto and was regarded as an attempt to win over older voters, a demographic Labour struggles with. As you may dimly recall, it did not work. Labour lost the election, and it did particularly badly with older voters: according to YouGov polling, only 14 per cent of over 70s turned out for Labour, and 22 per cent of those aged 60-69.
We’re heading into another general election, with a very different Labour Party facing off against a near infinitely more beleaguered incumbent Tory government. The issue of compensation for 1950s-born women who were not informed of changes to their pension entitlement is back in the news, after a report from the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) found in favour of the campaign and argued that the women impacted should receive compensation.
For a variety of reasons, it seems very, very difficult to imagine that Labour will make the same call on compensation as it did in 2019 . The first is to do not with the party but the country: the term “cost of living crisis” was not in common usage in 2019. Things were not good back then after nine gruelling years of Tory austerity, but they were better than they are today, at earlier stages of collapse and decay. In such circumstances the Waspi campaign will struggle to make the case that their cause is the best use of a substantial chunk of public money.
Other reasons for suspecting Labour won’t commit to Waspi compensation relate more directly to the party and its circumstances. In 2019, Labour talked the language of redress, almost reparation, on the pension issue. Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell talked about the need to right an “injustice” and Jeremy Corbyn talked about a “moral debt”. Starmer’s Labour does not generally talk about fiscal issues like this. The party has been going very hard on fiscal discipline (so hard that then-shadow schools minister Stephen Morgan joked the shadow chancellor would throw anyone seen making unfunded commitments into the nearest large body of water), doggedly costing policies and refusing to commit money to things far higher on their priority list than the Waspi issue. The most dramatic example is the two-child benefit cap, which they have not said they would scrap. This has proved to be a source of huge internal discontent. If they won’t do that, it seems very difficult to imagine them finding the cash for pension compensation down the back of the sofa.
Labour is also in a very different position in the polls. It’s very much ahead overall, and doing significantly better with older voters: 33 per cent of Britons in their 60s, according to YouGov polling from January, are intending to back Labour at the next election, versus 31 per cent who intend to vote Tory. The party can keep doing what it is doing and expect to win the election handily, it has no need to attempt a last minute vote grab. Asked on Friday if Labour would be making a commitment on Waspi, Shadow Attorney General Emily Thornberry declined to say that they would, saying that the party was waiting for the government’s response. I would imagine this answer will stay consistent even once that response is known.
Complacency, however, is regarded as one of Labour’s great internal enemies. And with that in mind, it is possible to imagine internal research and polling suggesting that Waspi woman looks an awful lot like much vaunted Stevenage woman, or another section of so-called “hero” voters the party feels it particularly needs to appeal to. I would imagine, however, that even in such circumstances, the party will look for a cheaper rip cord to pull.
Morgan Jones is freelance journalist and former Labour aide. She is a contributing editor of Renewal