"People Feel BETRAYED" James Melville On Labour's Energy Bills Flip-flopping

let welcome back James Melville to the show now James I must admit and I might be about to make myself deeply unpopular right now and I don't know look I'm I'm not old enough to understand um pensions or winter fuel payments or so on and so forth but it seems to me that what the labor government have done and I don't know where the threshold is set but they've just sort of made the winter fuel help um a means tested thing and the conservatives are running around scrambling sort of going no no no no no everyone should get it when actually it's kind of almost like a flip reverse normally it's the conservatives who say we should be very careful about who gets welfare and how much the state is paying to support people who might not need it and then there and it's the labor party cutting the welfare and the conservatives scrambling to attack them on it it's almost like you know a sort of weird flip reverse yeah politics is inverted it always happens like this but then I remember starmer standing up in the House of Commons doing numerous interviews that he was going to be the custodian and the champion of pensioners and you know make sure that winter fuel payments are part of all of that they went back on their promise and it was a big one because labor have been spending the last 14 years in a lot of cases quite rightly campaigning against austerity what they're doing now is austerity and one of the worst forms of it it's a it's punishment against millions of ELD and some are saying on the starmer side yeah but you know there's a lot of wastage there and some of the wealthy pensions don't need it that's not true I mean I've read some articles whereby over 2 million pensioners losing that alone is a difference between almost eating and heating right you know not everyone's within their threshold and it's a nefarious it's a nefarious policy by the labor govern they're trying to roll back a bit and muddy the waters and so on but ultimately what they have done is a politics of Cruelty against millions of pensioners yeah I mean just looking at this a lot of people feel betrayed I think labor I was going to say that when you look into this it seems like 11.4 million pensioners were entitled to the winter fuel allowance and now 10 million ARS that is actually a vast majority of pensioners um and uh you know like I said I'm not familiar with this world I don't sort of uh understand how it all works and how it's going to be means tested and where the thresholds lie but um it does it is like a strange flip reverse I mean like you said said I'm going to defend pensioners and now it seems like he's back paddling and trying to save himself by launching this pension credit scheme is it launched or did it already exist I don't know um but but then Steve Webb who is a liberal Democrat pensions minister in the coalition government said that if one in four eligible pensioners were to put in a claim so even if a quarter people who are entitled to it a third of the treasurers expected savings could be wiped out yeah exactly and so it's kind of austerity but without you know um doing anything in terms of the balance of payments or anything like that it's ridiculous and it's just alienated a lot of Voters the other tragic irony of this is the fact while millions of Pensions are lose their winter fuel alans we the taxpayer are still paying rmps their hitting costs on their second homes I read I read hilarious many of them I read a hilarious tweet earlier that in the last quarter or something or I can't remember but Ed millerand who is of course the energy minister claimed well over ,000 pounds for his energy and someone have put online what's he doing running a cannabis farm but this is this is the thing it's like again it's a reason why people have switched off on politics because it's they're they're telling that we've got to do this and tightener belts and there's a black hole of 20 million and meanwhile you're getting train drivers who are already on huge salaries getting potential big pay Rises MP's getting pay Rises MP's still getting their energy costs paid for by the taxpayer and Meanwhile we're facing the biggest tax burden since 1948 and no wonder Hunters around the country are going this isn't working for us no matter what government it is it's the same problems over and over again they come up with a set of pledges and Promises before the election and as soon as they get in power they seem to enjoy the trappings of power which include patronizing and telling us all us plebs how to behave and meanwhile they're being inconsistent with their polic based on their pledges and they're punishing communities of people people have had enough and already people have I think had enough of this government because you know when a new government comes in there should be an aspect of the sort of 100 day honeymoon the politics of Hope but unfortunately what we're getting here with this government a few weeks in is the politics of misery yeah J know it's amazing that the sort of massive plummeting With their popularity actually makes LZ trust look like she had a really good innings for a while there James don't go anywhere we're going to be joining you again after this break because I'll tell you what we really do need to talk about the sort of things that are happening on social media that aren't resulting in people being put in clink I'm talking about the Mad stuff that you can buy online like I said earlier Samar and I my producer sat there and like let's let's have a look shall we went on Instagram typed in a few words and I don't really know how to use social media okay I'm kind of of that age I'm analog Alex I kind of thank my lucky stars that social media didn't really come in until I was a fully formed adult human and so I wasn't caught up in its web of misery and went mental uh that's why I seem to have my common sense and my faculties still somehow relatively secure um but so you know even me with my bumbling idiy who doesn't know the street slang and barely knows how to use things like Instagram managed to in five minutes uh find sites where I could buy a zombie knife a load of drugs and a balac clava so there you go if I lose my job here at least I can become a career Criminal