WINTER FUEL PAYMENT FOR PENSIONERS NEEDS TO BE RESTORED, SAYS KEMI BADENOCH

CONSERVATIVE Party leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch has said that the winter fuel payment needs to be restored to pensioners but in a different form.

In an interview with GB News’ Political Editor Christopher Hope, for the latest edition of Chopper’s Political Podcast, she also said that it was not racist to worry about immigration.

Asked if the winter fuel allowance should be brought back, she said: “Yes, but not exactly as it was before.

“I don’t think millionaires should get the winter fuel allowance, but what Labour’s done is taking it away from poor people or people who need it. That’s wrong.”

Asked if she saw it as an attack on pensioners, she said: “Yes.”

Badenoch added: “I do think that there is some motivation there, ‘these aren’t our voters, so we can penalise them’. But also it is Labour’s foolishness.

“We have a Labour government that is very clueless. That winter fuel policy has been offered to every single government, and we’ve said no, every single leader

“And this time the officials waved it at Rachel Reeves. How about this? And she said, ‘yes’, that’s a very naive thing to do.

“I think one of the mistakes we made was making Reform voters think that they were not our people. They are our people. Many of the people who voted Reform were lifelong Tory voters.

“One of the moments that really created that impression was when we removed the whip from Lee Anderson. I think that was a mistake.

“I told the chief whip, do not do this. This is a bad, bad decision.

“That was a huge mistake and that lit the touchpaper, basically we are saying ‘we don’t want these kind of people’, to get them out.”

Asked if she thought Nigel Farage is a Tory, she said: “I think that he is a disruptor. But he has said that he wants to destroy the Conservative Party, so I think that’s probably a no.”

On immigration, she said pulling out of the ECHR would not be a solution on its own in bringing down numbers: “If that’s what we needed to control borders, yes.

“But what I’m not doing is making a commitment on that, because even if we did that now, it wouldn’t solve things…there are loads of other things to do.”

On a cap on migration, she said: “I’ve talked about the cap being a fake argument, because if you have net migration, say 10,000 and you’ve got 10,000 terrorists coming in, that’s no good.

“It’s about who you want to bring in o the country, who’s coming in. There’s no point if good people are leaving and bad people are coming in and saying, ‘oh, well, we’ve met the target’.

“This is how people use targets to trick you. Don’t fall for all this legal speak. Look at who we’re bringing in.”

She added: “It doesn’t necessarily make the country better if you’ve got more bad people coming in. So I think there should be a cap. I’m not going into numbers.

“What’s more important is who is coming into our country. And at the moment we don’t know. We’ve got to find out.”

Asked if it was racist to be worried about immigration, she said: “No, of course not. I’m worried about immigration. Lots of people who’ve just come into the country are worried.

“Asylum seekers are worried about immigration because the people they’re running from are also claiming asylum.

“We should all be worried about it because it matters for our future.”