I thought it was worth watching, just to remind ourselves of a couple of things:
Firstly, that this is the level of argument we can expect if we stay with the UK and in the decreasingly likely event that the UK elects Ed Miliband and his team to government. Curren was pathetic;
Secondly, that it looks to me that Labour isn't going to do anything much about the people at the poorer end of the scale.
You can say that she argues that it's only the richer pensioners that will lose their heating allowance, but even Curren said that she believed that universal benefits should be universal.
That's not because the poor pensioners need it the money; it's because once you means test, you make the benefit a handout to the poor. No one in power then has personal interest in it, except that they pay for it. It becomes as resented as benefits for the unemployed and the sick...and people who do need it, and are entitled to it, are made to feel like scroungers.
Once these changes are made, they will never be reversed. It's not "while we are in this terrible financial situation". It's forever.
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And what follows? If heating benefits are only for the poor, then why not other benefits? Most obviously the retirement pension itself.
Already one of the most niggardly in Europe (as a percentage of average earnings), most well-off people don't desperately need it. So the next time the government needs to save money, why not cut the pension for the rich? Then the retirement pension becomes a hand out for the poor in which the rich have no stake and poor pensioners become scroungers.
Of course what Mrs Curren and Labour fail to consider in their quest for savings (£100 million in nothing in governmental terms) is the massive tax fraud that is allowed in the UK.
Indeed the whole of the London economy appears to be based on the fact that tax fiddling here is like taking candy from a baby. It's hardly fashionable to be paying more tax than your servants, dear boy!
The figures show that even by HMRC's own figures there is a sum of £30 billion (approx Scottish government's running costs) of uncollected taxes annually. According to the Tax Justice Network the figure is actually four times that size.
We know that the Tories neither care that pensioners should be made to feel like paupers begging for their pension, nor do they wish to make any inroads into the excellent tax avoidance schemes that have been set up with government acquiescence over the years. But instead of making poorer pensioner feel like they are scroungers, why doesn't Labour (the party of the workers, remember) look to these tax evaders to lay their hands on the £100 million that Margaret needs for her houses.
Incidentally, why does Labour let this woman anywhere near a tv or radio studio? She is a car crash every time she goes near a mic.
