I spent a very lively couple of hours with the Pensioners’ Convention in Halesowen this week. Thanks to Gordon and Beryl for inviting me and making me so welcome. Special thanks to the tough questioners who taught me so much about the trials and tribulations our modern life lands upon our elderly citizens. Between Margaret Thatcher and Gordon Brown governments have consistently fudged the issues that matter to pensioners, happier giving tax breaks to their super-rich buddies than helping those who fought and worked to make Britain livable.
People’s rose-tinted view of Thatcher as a great Prime Minister is so, so far short of reality and her mean-spirited termination of the link between earnings and pensions exemplifies that. Gordon Brown’s belief that means tested, over-complex and dishonest Pension Credit system was a decent response to the problem demonstrates his inability to function in the real world.
That both main parties have now committed to restoring the link by 2015 shows how little they understand what they’re doing to our elderly. How many people have and will die in poverty by 2015 because of Thatcher’s snatch of their pension rights? Currently, 2.5 million people – former tax payers, war heroes and parents of our citizens are living below the poverty line because they thought their National Insurance contribution would give them a decent pension until Thatcher’s government reneged on the promise in 1980.
Thanks to her, who many still regard as a heroine, pensioners now earn less in real terms than they did in the 1950s. Worse, Gordon Brown’s Pension Credit bureaucracy, which frightens most people away and even its own officers couldn’t understand, asks for the minutest detail about a pensioners assets yet happily mis-calculates the interest they would earn from their savings to an outrageous 10 percent – 10 times the current truth! Frankly, it’s callous and little short of criminal.
I’m proud that my party would rather save money elsewhere, closing super-rich tax dodges and restore this link immediately. I reckon 2.5 million people lifted out of poverty would be a pretty good first step for a new government, don’t you?
Neville Farmer
