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?

[HauntedBungalow]

Also, I am genuinely bored of this British obsession with referencing World War II when talking about unrelated random subjects.

World War II ended 80 years ago. The "wartime generation" don't need a Winter Fuel Allowance because they're all already dead, barring the odd 97 year old who is still living at home and paying all bills themselves.

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

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

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.

@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.

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.

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.

@Windchimesandsong Early death via shit housing and shit workplace conditions was the lot of the labouring class proletariat at that time. WWII hastened it for some. My own dear pa lost his own father at age 4 before the war even began, in a factory, but there are no national days of mourning for those men. He went on to have the kind of childhood you might expect a fatherless child in the 1930s to have ie an absolutely diabolical one.

The world is a different place now, for better or worse, and constantly harping on about one chapter in it is pointless and irrelevant.

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.

Yeah absolutely, the ones that couldn't access assets for whatever reason are really fucking poor.

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.

Ignorance is not always bliss, OP.

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

@TheHateIsNotGood the problem you have is late stage capitalism. You personally didn't do anything "wrong"' I can almost guarantee that.

@Allthegoodnamesarechosen honestly, please just stop talking about the war. It's embarrassing. And no, the UK experience was nothing like the scale of the continent/russian/Japanese experience.

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.

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. 🌷

There are plenty of elderly people arounthers, lked who were children during WW2 so he is right about some pensioners who will not receive the WFA this year. Others, like me, were born a few years after the war.

Not getting the allowance this year doesn't bother me but it is hard for those who are only just over the the threshold limit for pension credit, even by a very small amount, and who have previously paid their winter fuel bills out of the allowance.

It was also a poor move by Labour, it hasn't won them many friends.

£300 (I think that is what I got last year), works out at roughly £5.76 per week, I can't tell whether someone else would find it difficult to put that aside all year round but it is probably a good idea to save some for fuel bills. However don't people usually pay monthly by DD anyway? I do, pay all my bills that way so I have no sudden huge bills.

My dad was born in '47 and for the first few years of his life had a ration book. He's still got it somewhere. He doesn't need the WFP, just puts it in his savings or gives it to his grandchildren.

The wartime generation does not just mean someone who was old enough to fight. How embarrassing to be so ignorant.

" i think better to give to some who don't need it than risk some not getting it who do need it and might be suffering in a cold house all winter."

At the end of the day, the will of the people was to vote for austerity via the conservatives and then Brexit. Both impoverished the country and we need to accept the country is in decline.

We have the highest taxes since world war 2 and pretty much every publicly service is still falling apart. Kind of ironic since the "wartime generation" voted overwhelmingly to leave...

My dad was born 5 years after the war. (Was still very much feeling the affects of war growing). His crap army pension means he just misses out on pension credit. The new cuts to winter fuel payments mean he will now face some hardship. This is a man who has cancer and severe arthritis. Not all pensioners were using it to jet off abroad.

I do understand what you mean about the obsession with world war 2 however. A lot of the older generation have passed.

My DM died last month age 91, so she won't need the fuel allowance this year, but she was badly bombed in Coventry aged 7, she spent the night of the Coventry blitz underneath a table rather than in the shelter because there had been a lot false alarms, woke up to a city with no water, no power and piles of smoking rubble everywhere, and lost friends and neighbours. She also didn't really get a proper school education as a result and left school without any qualifications. The war has massively affected her life, and our lives too including my DD's through the trauma it caused. My aunt is the same age, also growing up in Coventry, and still very much alive.

I feel like the effects of the wars and what that generation went through are massively underplayed.

ilcuk.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/The-Myth-of-the-Baby-Boomer.pdf

This is an interesting challenge to the suggestion that all 'BBs' are wealthy and asset rich.

Rationing didn’t end till the 1950’s and those children born close after had parents who were deeply affected by WW2.

My parents were close to mid forties when they had me and had grown up in WW2. My Mother, Father and stepfather all had many issues because of the war.I know my Mother's Fathers death serving in the forces affected her terribly, she was also sexually assaulted as a very young teen more than once during the war and remembered being hungry. My biological Fathers family were refugees due to the war and my Fathers sister was killed during their escape.I wasn’t born till the sixties. I used to have to ring my Mother on firework night after I left home as the sound of fireworks ansolutley traumatised her due to being caught in bombing raids as a child/teenager. My Dad died a few years ago as did my Mother. He was crying for his baby sister not long before he died.

The accepted definition of the Greatest Generation/Wartime Generation is people born before 1928. And there are very few of those left. However, people of Nick Robinson’s age would have grown up surrounded by them and he seems to be using the term as an emotive synonym for ‘old’. As a nation we are obsessed with WWII. None of this has much to do with the WFA. The decision to scrap it for all but the very poorest pensioners feels like an own goal for Labour which is overshadowing any good work they are doing.

it is emotive though
my dm born in 1935 remembers the war
ok she was young but she still remembers it and would have been 10 when it ended and been affected

my dm's fridge and freezer and full of left overs
nothing is ever thrown away

The mental gymnastics some go through to justify this policy is quite something. If Sunak had done this there would be riots.