Nick Robinson on the Today programme said that people affected by withdrawing the Winter Fuel Allowance were "the wartime generation". AIBU to think he's wrong?

Thanks for remembering that @JenniferBooth . I know someone who sadly died horribly from cancer as a result of that decades later. It did horrible damage to his body. His very elderly wife was nursing him 24/7 for the last three years of his life.

RIP. 🌷

Your last sentence is utterly appalling.

I never swear on here, but have some fucking respect for people who sacrificed a great deal - often everything - so you could live your life in freedom.

Ignorance is not always bliss, OP.

’ It's not like the continent where entire areas got razed ‘

I'm 1962 born and just scraping by as I look forward to my state pension as my only income.

It's a very good thing I suppose that I'm considered a 'lower' human being for my efforts towards effecting the considerable cultural changes needed to effect many of the changes that have now made it th'e norm' for the mothers of young children to go back out and earn a living to ensure that a 2 parent household earns enough to pay the bills.

Not quite what I was 'fighting' for for all those years,

Something has gone drastically wrong methinks.

Yet again I am horrified by this the sweeping assumptions about baby boomers. There not an homogeneous group. For every boomer that grew up in the land of milk of honey there are plenty others that have lived in poverty all their lives.

Yes this. Haven't got the link to hand but the stereotype of the "wealthy boomer" is just that. A stereotype.

As it happens, studies have found that inequality within older age groups is the most extreme of any age group in the UK.

I'm not saying it has anything to do with winter fuel payments ,I'm just replying to your declaration that UK residents didn't experience war. A ridiculous statement.

I am affected by loss of WFA. In that I am struggling on a small amount above full state pension, as a single householder, so have to heat my small home on one pension, and a new roof to save for. I got state pension in October last year, but didn’t get WFA then because you had to qualify by 28th Sept. My birthday is 5th Oct. And won’t get it this year. The difference it made is £50 pcm towards the Nov - Feb bills. I froze last year to make my bills affordable. But I am fit and active so can get out to the library etc rather than heat the house. Or used my Freedom Pass to sit in museums and galleries. It was culturally enlightening!

My parents were born in 1931 and died last year. I was born in a prefab house - it was like a hut, with a corrugated iron curved roof. Loads of people still lived in them. Rationing ended in 1954, 3 years before I was born.

I am not the war generation, my generation invented Punk, and bunked off school to watch A Clockwork Orange when underage.

I never collected pennies for a Spitfire, I’m not an old dear, and certainly not a Wealthy Boomer so contemptuously derided on MN. If I had ever had a WFA it would have been spent on heating. With gratitude.

@HauntedBungalow DH's parents were young children during WW2. They're, I believe, known as "the silent generation". Not in their 90s. They're in their 80s. Some people in their 90s are still around though.

They didn't fight no (being children) but they did go through having fathers and uncles away fighting. Many of DH's parents generation lost a father or uncle to the war. Dead or terribly injured.

They also went through rationing (as did the older "boomers" because it didn't completely end until the 50s).

And they went through the bombings. And some of their generation, especially those from London (which today has the highest pensioner poverty levels in the UK) were evacuated - sent away from their parents during a war not knowing if they'd see them alive again.

They were born before the NHS and welfare state.

Also, the vast majority (and "boomers" too) left school at 14, 15, or 16 to start work. Only a very small minority went to university.

CWP is only paid to people on certain income-related benefits, and even then, it only becomes payable when certain weather stations record a temperature below freezing for three consecutive days within a week. Usually it's no more than 2 or 3 payments in any calendar year, even in colder parts of the UK.

It's no longer paid in Scotland, where it has been replaced with a one-off annual Winter Heating Payment of £58.odd which usually materialises sometime around Christmas. So even if what is perpetually the coldest part of the UK suffers a historic freeze, tough, 58 quid is your lot.

National service ended in 63! Just a few years before I was born

My father did it, build sheds. Not an actual thing

Not the wartime generation, he clearly meant it as some mawkish phrase to evoke sympathy

A wartime generation means people old enough to be adults during the war, people who served during the war

A bit of rationing in the late 40's and 50's does not mean anything compared to the adults (vast majority dead) who actually served

My grandparents served in the war - my grandfather would have been 105 now, my father born almost at the end - obviously remembered nothing (if alive he would have been 81)

The wartime generation are dead

I do think there is a lazy assumption that all elderly people must have lived through the war and remember it well. An ex-neighbour of ours who is in his early 70s was quite unimpressed at being invited out to some sort of entertainment specifically targeted at the elderly where the music was all Vera Lynn and Gracie Fields - as he pointed out, in his teens and twenties he was listening to Elvis, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

@HauntedBungalow that figures.

I have no idea how many 90+ year olds there still are living independently, but I have 6 in my extended family (my parents' generation).
They range from 98 to 90.

They were all affected by rationing during their childhood, teen years and/or young adulthood.

Some were evacuated.

They were all affected by national service, either personally or because their boyfriends/future husbands served (some during the war and some just after).

They don't all need the winter fuel allowance, but in my view they all deserve to be described as the wartime generation, even though the youngest was still a child when war ended.

I mean I think child benefit/family allowance should still be universal like it used to be. Im also pretty sure they will raise the age of free prescriptions. It doesn’t make sense to have WF as universal simply because of age. I see the argument re cut offs but isn’t this true for all benefits?

@PickAChew Thanks, I didn’t know about the cold weather payments.

Your ignorance is astounding. 43,000 civilians were killed in the London blitz. Over 100,000 were injured. How can you say that not many people in the UK experienced the war because" there was no invasion /firestorm / atom bomb". Talk to my mother who watched the London docks burning ,who sat terrified in air shelters as bombs fell from the sky above, who stepped out into London streets that were demolished wondering if her home was still there ,and tell her she didn't experience war.

Because they're not as physically vulnerable. Those on very low incomes and certain benefits get cold weather payments, though.

And not everyone who received the universal WFP was frail or poor.

Younger people can take on more employment, work extra hours. Younger people are generally more physically fit.When a skint 20yo student, I worked in a pub in the evenings which kept me warm and gave me a cash boost.

But young families may not have the capacity to take on more work. Not every person under 60 in poverty is a 20 yr old student.