Take pencil. Choose dateline with eyes closed.
Draw line under 1950. Award 50% more pension to millions born after that date.
Smile on returning to bunker, secure in certainty that the infirm are far less likely to vote or riot.
In several press titles yesterday, reports began to leak out that the ‘new flat-rate higher pension’ will ONLY apply to new pensioners after 2015. When I first showed this to my wife, she thought it was an April Fool. But then the Telegraph’s Janet Daley wrote a withering piece about it. (I would give you the link, but it’s crashed: I’d guess this is a result of the millions of hits it must still be getting).
It is an accurate reflection of the back-passage gaping culture we endure in Cruel Britannia today, that while there are dozens of imaginary paranoid ‘isms’, the one that is alive, real and blindingly obvious – ageism – has not a single piece of substantive legislation to curb it. There is no law about incitement to wrinkly hatred. No ridiculous workplace rules about age harassment. And not a single ‘human right’ ascribed to our dribbling years. We are allowed to call people “Grumpy old men”, but not “Ugly young feminists”.
Throughout the continuing zero-rates regime (a socially pointless exercise designed to allow banks to recoup their self-made losses, and keep the derivatives Tsunami at bay) some 19.4% of formally and informally retired UK households saw their investment income literally decimated. Their reward for this has been to be told that they are ‘the lucky ones’ who got on the property bandwagon and had full employment and good education and all those other things since ruined by two generations of unscrupulous and cretinous politicians.
Typical of such unthinking ‘just be thankful’ drivel was this gem from Laith Khalaf of pension advisors Hargreaves Lansdown, who told the media today:
“The way we imagine it working is that all the elements of the existing system are rolled into one into a simplified state pension….The winners will include lower earners, women who have taken time out to raise a family, and potentially the self-employed. These people would have typically expected a lower pension than £155….”
Oh, is that how you imagine it Laith, old top? Those will be the only winners then, will they? This is Laith Khalaf:
Do you mind me asking where your parents were born, Laith? Do you mind me enquiring after your age, O Lucky Man?
What a ghastly observation! How could I possibly think such a thing? Well, to all those about to pull the plug on their Slog memberships, might I just point out that this has nothing to do with racism. Ask my daughter’s former live-in bloke Paul (half Iranian) if I’m a racist: I’m sure he’d happily deny it. As would all my Jewish friends in Manchester and London, my Chinese friends in Liverpool, and the dozens of sub-continent or West Indian colleagues I’ve had over the years.
Racism has got nothing to do with it: this is about commonsense justice. Forget me for a minute, and see it this way: what age is Laith do you reckon – 35? 40 tops? His mum and dad could be 62, three years off retirement. Suppose they got here in, say, 1960. From 2015, they will have a pension 50% higher than my Dad, who got his head, feet and psyche shot at in the RAF for four years to enable them to get it without using very long German words and putting verbs at the end of every sentence. He has been paying taxes since 1933. He is still paying them, although he has Alzheimers. He has very bad Alzheimers because he was denied medication under NICE rules six years ago. He lives in a retirement home funded by a dwindling savings pot earning 0.5% interest rates.
That, my friends (if you still are my friends) is a crass, cynical and disgusting injustice on a par with the verbal abuse received by Deep South freedom riders in the 1960s US. And don’t try and tell me the comparison is risible: for the last year of that decade, I was there.
Where is the compassion in this country today? Where the reward for good social behaviour? Where the civilised duty to the old? Where the ethics vital to avoid the latest amoral soundbite invention, ‘moral hazard’?
Think on this before you proceed to the rest of this potentially offensive piece: what is the biggest single upcoming pension-requirement glut in British history?
The answer, of course, is the post-war Baby Boomers: we unlucky souls created by the grateful sexual appetite of those who survived the fight against Hitler.
The masterclass in cynicism being floated by the DWP as a basis for future pension ‘fairness’ is nothing more than a ruse for cutting the benefits owed to this group by 33%.
So it is time to wade into some muddy waters, and reveal this scam for the sociopathic calculation it is.
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Single Mothers. Pure Dacre Mail territory, right? Few citizens have spent more time than The Slog defending single mothers against the ghastly Secret Family Courts.
The Independent records that 56.5% of single mothers are not in work, and the DWP estimates (they tell me) that some 20% of these have two children. Once is unlucky, twice careless, and thrice is a habit in need of a cure – aka, self-discipline. We’re all human, and I sympathise – I really do. But why reward that person with 50% more pension rights than a settled, stable 1970s mother whose kids have never caused the police a minute’s-worth of problems?
The economically inactive. The Press Association noted today that these folks (8.16 million in number, and only 7.3% of whom are disabled) have risen to record levels. They aren’t pensioners: they’re people who, as it were, don’t do anything. Under the new legislative pension proposals, they will get a State pension 50% higher than mine. Venal of me to mention this I know, but my advisors tell me I paid over £680,000 in tax during my working life. Can you imagine any commercial assurance company running a scheme with rules like that?
“How fortunate of you to have earned that much money,” I hear you think and that’s my point. I don’t deserve to get free prescriptions, but I get them anyway. And a bloody bus pass, for the Lord’s own sake. I don’t deserve a State pension either – but as I’ve coughed up some £90,000 towards it – and the above folks have contributed very little beyond a socking great welfare cost – why are they getting 50% more of it than I am?
This really is not about selfish greed. I’m happy to admit that £200 extra a month after 2015 would come in handy; it is not, however, the demarcation line between happiness and debtors’ prison for me. But the reason why pensions and other retirement benefits cannot be properly targeted is ‘obvious’: it would mean (we are told) yet more obscenely pensioned pinstripes to achieve that.
Except that this too is complete drivel. A perfectly adequate and pre-programmed mainframe computer (just the one) could handle this issue with consummate ease. The ‘we can’t afford to target’ bollocks is one of the great 21st Century lies. Investing in technology to target benefits would wipe out most of the HMRC Humphreys (Sir or otherwise). That is is the single reason why it has never been done.
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The thoughts outlined above will no doubt be dismissed by many as a rant. But sometimes, nothing less than an angry and spirited revolt will do in order to bring the smug, complacent and uncaring to their senses. The Plimsoll Line that has saved hundreds of thousands of innocent lives since the mid 19th century became law because the MP Plimsoll had a hissy fit in the Commons until exactly the same class of self-satisfied legislators got off their pimply backsides in order to shut him up. Suffragettes broke half the laws of the land in order to get the vote. And Mars bars would no longer be suitable for vegetarians without a public outcry that went beyond empty tabloid headlines. The tradition of extra-legislature resistance has a long and almost entirely honourable history in the West.
The core issue at stake here is one that The Slog has raised many times: the innate unfairness of a tax system based on income alongside a welfare system only rarely based on income at all.
The blindingly illogical nature of such a paradox seems to pass our elected officials by. It is entirely apparent to unelected civil servants, tax-evading globalists, those enjoying inherited wealth, and most of the Leftist axis still dominating Establishment thought – and Coalition thought – in Britain. But then, none of these agenda-lugging folks has the remotest interest in flagging it up.
Until such time as principles based on social justice enter the tax-and-welfare farce we have in the contemporary UK, there will continue to be tooth-rattling inequities like this proposed 1950 cut-off in pension benefits.
I would like to see a tax system based on social and anti-social behaviour come to pass in the UK. Frankly, I am unimpressed by the numbers of people telling me how difficult this would be to administer. Justice is not supposed to be easy: it’s meant to be telling. A points system agreed by every incoming Government would also be easily accommodated by a half-decent computer program. And if – as I also wish – such points were mostly devolved to community level, market forces would once again apply: good citizens would wish to live in places where their goodness was rewarded, and goodness overall would become a more valued commodity.
In the meantime (and it’ll probably be a long, long time) I like to think that there are enough lively wrinklies and students of the Mutual Community to take on this latest example of David Cameron’s Big Society. As I’ve written many times before, big is nearly always bad, unfeeling, and advantageous to those who want to grasp what’s on offer rather than take responsibility. It rounds up none of the bad guys – only the sums available to the wasters. And it has nearly always ground down the deserving. We should take this opportunity to ram the Big Pension Con up the Coalition’s backside with all the legal force of protest available to us.






