Ex-Labour minister says winter fuel U-turn smacks of incompetence
A former Labour minister from the Blair-era says the UK government's U-turn over the winter fuel allowance "smacks of incompetence".More than three-quarters of pensioners will receive the winter fuel payment after Chancellor Rachel Reeves confirmed she would roll back her decision to cut the benefit.Kim Howells said the original policy was "daft" and that UK Labour ministers seemed to be "rudderless" and "floating around".The UK government was asked for comment.
The former Pontypridd MP told BBC Radio Wales Breakfast: "The problem… is it smacks of incompetence. These U-turns don't look good, they never look good."This seemed to be kind of rudderless, floating around, not knowing which way to turn, and now they face this kind of humiliation, and really there was no need for it."It's true that people like me on a decent pension don't need it, but there are millions and millions who do need it."For a Labour government to be doing this just seems daft really."I'm afraid that this, along with a number of other decisions, has allowed people quite validly to level really very significant criticism at the government."
Howells had a series of ministerial jobs under Tony Blair, including in the Foreign Office, before he was reshuffled out by Gordon Brown in 2008. He left Parliament in 2010.In the radio interview Howells criticised the communication style of the prime minister."I don't understand anything Sir Keir Starmer says."It's this kind of London techno speak, which nobody understands."It's a mist instead of a clear policy, and that's what we need really. People need something to aim at, they need a hope, they need a future."
He said Welsh Labour would "undoubtedly" pay the price for the UK government's actions - but Howells also criticised the Welsh government's performance.The former minister said devolution was designed "to make Wales better, but our health service is even worse than in England"."Welcome to Wales means you get all those tunnels in Newport," he said, referring to the 2019 scrapping of plans for an M4 relief road by former Labour first minister Mark Drakeford."We have to do much more than we have done at the moment."Howells complained about what he saw as the "curse of the Welsh Assembly" in calling for subsidies, using the original name for the Cardiff Bay legislature which was changed to the Welsh Parliament in 2020."It's not been about encouraging entrepreneurships and getting people to start their own businesses. It's been constantly about the old politics of 'we haven't had our share, we must get our share'."Asked about the row over whether Wales would benefit from funding for the Oxford to Cambridge railway line, he said: "Sure, that public investment is very important."But I don't think that's going to sort out transport problems in Wales or the future of Wales."It needs this outfit in Cardiff, it needs Keir Starmer's government in London, to realise that the world is changing at a fantastic pace and we've got to change with it."
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Why obsessing over ‘identity' is a stupid idea
Earlier this year, delivering the annual Richard Dimbleby Lecture, Gareth Southgate argued that in Britain today, too many boys and young men are suffering an identity crisis. They need better role models: only through emulating such figures can they reverse their own slump into academic underachievement, Andrew Tate-fuelled misogyny and feelings of worthlessness. The speech was widely praised. It seemed, if you'll forgive the pun, that the former England manager was shooting at an open goal. Few disputed that the fundamental problem was our boys' sense of identity, or that this sense needed to be made stronger and more resilient. Or maybe not. In this incendiary and timely broadside, Australian philosopher Alexander Douglas argues that the entire concept of 'identity', as we find it in contemporary discourse, is wrong. There's something undeniably odd about looking to others to find one's true self. Personal authenticity surely can't be a matter of imitation – and yet, for good or ill, we do it all the time. As children, we play at being superheroes, monsters, parents, criminals, police: we try to find out who we are by playing at being what we are not. As adults, Alexander suggests, we continue this role-play, but with a twist: we're motivated by fear to hunker down in silos of identity definition. Hence, perhaps, the rise of identity politics, as manifested on all sides: Black Lives Matter, the English Defence League, #MeToo, Proud Boys, self-regarding wellness crypto-fascists, the LGBTQ+ community. It seems unlikely that Nicola Sturgeon, Nigel Farage or Donald Trump would have been elected were it not for the respectively Scottish, English and American national identities to which their supporters cleave. Identity politics has for some time been excoriated by conservatives, but increasingly it is attacked by the Left too. 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He counsels something called 'identitylessness', which – following the philosophies of Girard, Spinoza and the ancient Chinese sage Zhuangzhi – involves breaking out of the prison of individual identity and realising that we're all, in a profound sense, connected to everything. 'We are the others and the others are us,' he writes at his most rhapsodic, 'not because we share an identity, but because we are alike in identitylessness… I believe we have barely begun to live in the world together. Our drive for identity is always getting in the way.' Alexander is alert to the complaint that this anti-identity vision might be deranging, that 'a world without identity is terrifying'. Not just terrifying, I would argue, but scarcely comprehensible. Yet he believes in it. At one point, he movingly recounts how he struggled to deal with his father's Alzheimer's disease. His dad's identity was being brutally stripped to nothing. 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