I THINK the Jesuits used to call it mental reservation. The rest of us know it as crossing your fingers. It has other good names too. Casuistry. Sophistry. Pettifogging. Being too clever by half.

There can’t be terribly many aspiring Labour politicians who entered politics imagining they’d spend their first few weeks on the job voting to reduce the incomes of millions of British pensioners and pretending – as much to themselves as anyone else – that they must be doing the right thing.

But here they are, and this week, this new-minted generation of Labour ­politicians – many of them now from Scotland – marched through the division lobbies and took to the airwaves to do ­precisely that.

The fact this is one of the first significant public acts of the Starmer government is ­political madness, and it is being handled in the characteristically clunky way we ought to have come to expect from a government dominated by the Labour right, who told everyone they intended to visit misery on the country, and now seems surprised that a decent chunk of the electorate seems to have assumed they were joking or lying.

The kompromat dug up from all the senior Labour figures when in opposition hasn’t helped.

In August 2022, Rachel Reeves told her social media world she would “never forget a woman in Leeds West I spoke to, who had purple fingers because her pension wasn’t enough to pay for the heating. We must act now.”

I somehow doubt the Chancellor’s ­initiative is the kind of action this ­frostbitten granny had in mind for a ­balmier future.

'Tough decision'

Labour’s justification for prioritising these cuts continues to evolve – from ­stripping pensions of their gas money to avoid a Liz Truss-style market event – to presenting the guillotining of this ­universal benefit as a kind of political ­virility test for the party leadership. This, we’re told, is a “tough decision to improve living standards”.

Quite how dying of hypothermia in ­December improves your living standards is a question for the philosophers. How admitting more sickly older people to our hospitals and doctor’s surgeries during the surge months of winter helps struggling public services probably belongs to all the actuaries out there.

Pensioners are set to suffer from Winter Fuel Payment cutsPensioners are set to suffer from Winter Fuel Payment cuts

We were told last week, for ­example, that one of Labour’s visions for the NHS is a greater emphasis on ­preventative ­spending. Viewers in Scotland may ­remember this from the 2011 Christie Commission on the future delivery of ­public services, spending now to save ­later, addressing the lesser evil to ward off the greater.

You’d think that supporting the energy bills of particularly vulnerable groups sits squarely in the middle of this kind of ­preventative policy, but apparently not.

The rank and file are expected to sob their way loyally through all these ­humiliations in order to preserve the promise of all the future ­disappointments this government has in store for us all. They want you to know it isn’t easy, though. Conjure the sad scenes. Bring your own hankie, as there’s no state ­subsidy.

Journalist Lewis Goodall tweeted last week: “I am told there were several Labour MPs in tears in the voting lobbies when voting for the winter fuel changes this afternoon.”

The particularly big-hearted among you might feel a fleeting whisper of sympathy for the predicament these parliamentary drones find themselves in. But I rather suspect sympathy will be thin on the ground with this one, and people will ask themselves who these tears are really ­being shed for.

Some policies are complex. Others are difficult to explain. This one is brutally simple. As it stands, the energy grant is a few hundred pounds. It isn’t means-­tested or taxed as income. On Friday night, the Department for Work and ­Pensions ­finally published its equality analysis of Labour’s flagship winter fuel cuts policy.

Holiday slush fund

This shows that 83% of over-80s across the UK will lose the benefit, as will around 70% of disabled pensioners. Some pensioners may – as some media outlets have been at pains to stress – salt away this extra government cash into a wine or holiday slush fund.

But you don’t need to range far to find other people struggling. I was ­talking to a friend recently who relayed an older relative’s experiences. Like many forms of modern surveillance which we ­welcome into our lives, the Smartmeter offers the illusion of greater control over our lives.

Instead of guessing how much gas or ­electricity you’re burning through by turning on the central heating or setting a soup pot to boil, you can see the ­energy, in real time, flying out of your bank ­account as your bill gains zeros in front of your eyes. In theory, this should help you regulate your energy use, prioritising what is important to you, reminding you to turn off wasteful.

Exceed your daily energy cap on a cold snap, and your smart meter will even flash red at you, encouragingly. Duly ­triggered, who could blame life’s ­thriftier ­pensioners for experiencing a fight or flight response, or approaching this ­oracle for their energy use with a kind of ­obsessive and all-consuming paranoia, as the cold goes creeping through the house, and the lights stay unlit? It is no way to live.

Another detail in the report ­highlights the real impact of this retreat from ­universalism. The DWP reckon that there are around 780,000 people who are ­entitled to Pension Credit but are not claiming it. Unless they get their act ­together, all of these people will lose ­Winter Fuel Payments too as well as ­everything else they’re entitled to.

This shouldn’t surprise us. Complex ­administrative systems and application process are another kind of barrier to ­accessing people’s entitlement. Tough cookie, some people might say. It isn’t the Government’s fault if people aren’t ­applying for their fair share of public ­support and it goes by you.

Sometimes it is helpful to go back to first principles. What is the case for universalism? First, and most unglamorously, there are the procedural costs both for the punter applying and for the state. Establish eligibility criteria to access a service or a payment, and you mandate the establishment of a whole administrative apparatus to test people’s eligibility.

Bamboozled by ad-min

Universalism helps ensure that ­nobody falls through the cracks, bamboozled by administrative systems, or badly treated because their particular ­circumstances don’t fit into the assumption ­underpinning how a system has been designed.

If prescriptions are free, people needn’t be afraid or even just insecure about how they pay for the pills they need. If ­education is supported by our taxes ­whatever kind of background you come from, kids with difficult relationships with their parents know they won’t be judged on their mum and dad’s ­pocket-book ­rather than their own.

If you are really concerned about the progressive distribution of such grants of public funds, you can always tax them.

Politicians can usually rely on their families to be supportive, but this is the kind of cut likely to cause even your ­fondest aunt to begin asking you critical questions about what you got into politics for, and what you are achieving there.

But here we are, a little more than 70 days into the change administration, and ­Labour are being outflanked on the left by ­Rishi ­Sunak, and Tory Party comms are ­clipping photographs of the new PM chortling in a press huddle over the ­legend “Keir ­Starmer having a laugh on his private jet after cutting winter fuel for millions of pensioners”.

What the Tories used to call the politics of envy, at least, seems to have rapidly changed hands.