CITY AND SUBURBAN
Gordon Brown stages his Good King Wenceslas act, and guess who's the lucky winner
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
There must, so I thought, be a catch in it. Just answer a few simple questions and you, too, could win. . . . Time-share pro- moters write to me in such specious terms, but not, surely, the Department of Social Security? I could win a winter fuel allowance, so it tells me. So long as I am not in prison in the third week in Septem- ber, or subject to immigration control, I can expect to receive £150 in good time for Christmas. There is a trick question about receiving income-based job-seeker's allowance while living permanently in resi- dential care (*see footnote), and this must be the tie-breaker. Better still, there is a jackpot carried over from the last three winters. Those who shivered through them and survived now qualify for the allowances that should have kept us warm — £20, another £20, and £100 for the rigours of the winter we have just endured. So much for global warming. These winter fuel allowances are part of Gordon Brown's Good King Wenceslas act. They appear regularly in his budget speeches, to pre- dictable applause. Now, as he always does, he must be looking for ways to make them more complicated. He could tax them, or put them on a sliding scale from chilly Cambridge to temperate Torquay, or require me to produce my gas bill, properly receipted. He might even come round with a sack and put coal in my bath. As yet, though, the link between the winter fuel and the money is no more than nominal, or propagandist. His colleagues in Newcastle upon Tyne have offered to send me a cheque and I mean to spend it on a decent case of bottled central heating.
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