Winter Fuel Allowance

You will also need to reduce housing costs.....and taking freebies away from better off pensioners who never vote Labour anyway is a free hit - politically speaking - because the ones being pissed off never vote Labour anyway.

To be fair I am citing the cold political calculations behind this because these Labour centrist types can be coldly calculating at times to the detriment of principle.

Nevertheless, I do not in the slightest think it spiteful to withdraw handouts from people who simply don't need them. There is an argument for a higher threshold before freebies are removed, but the principle of targeting support where it is most needed, at the cost of withdrawing handouts from those who don't need them is reasonable and in no way spiteful. Especially when many of those losing handouts are better off than many of the working age people paying the taxes to finance this.

I think this is an excellent idea, very easy to put in place, reduces overall spend but covers most of the borderline cases. 

A seemingly sensible suggestion but with a glaring problem. Only working age people are entitled to universal credit so putting the pensioner fuel payment onto it would not work. Pensioners have a completely different set of benefits to most of the ones available to working age people, Putting it onto pension credit might make a lot more sense and is probably what you are driving at, but this too has inherent complications. Many pensioners might spend most of the year  well above the pension credit limit except for the one month when the winter fuel payment is added to it. This would involve a bureaucratic nightmare with fresh claims having to be made every winter. The situation can be made even more complicated by the fact that other help for pensioners is often dependent on pension credit receipt, so getting it for just one month a year would hugely complicate that. In practice quite a lot wouldn't bother applying

For it to work more easily the payment would have to be spread evenly throughout the whole year, but of course the problem then is that they are getting extra when  their heating bills are minimal and correspondingly much less when they most need it.

Better to keep the winter fuel payment but make the eligibility a bit less stringent, by for example including in it all pensioners who are tenants and all pensioners living in Band A properties

I agree with the latter point though again it raises the issue of where is the funding for that going to come from.

And putting it onto pension credit is far more complicated in practice for the reasons I stated above.

Far easier to simply expand the eligibility criteria a little and I suggested a couple of ways this could be done.

Why don't Labour go after the tax dodgers?

Why don't they pursue foreign billionaires who are ripping off the country?

Why don't they pursue the COVID PPE loan fraud both in government and outside of it?

Why take money instead from fricking winter fuel allowance? Because pensioners are too frail to fight back and it's a politically easy move?