Snapshot of _How Britain became a gerontocracy || The pensions boost is further proof that Britain is run for the benefit of the older generation — paid for by the young_ :
An archived version can be found [here.](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-britain-became-a-gerontocracy-qrr086jtt)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
We can charge NI on pensioner incomes and use those additional funds to increase the pension credit (not the state pension) to help poorer pensioners. That would be fair and a good policy.
What we can't do is charge additional NI on working class while increasing the state pension for all pensioners, when over 80% of them are wealthy and don't need it at a time when all income of the working class are going down in real terms.
Or we just apply the exact same "lock", whatever we decide it is, so that NMW, UC, and state pension all increase by the same percentage.
I'm fine with the state pension going up. Just not *only* the state pension going up.
I’ve long wanted some equality there: peg minimum wage, benefit cap and the tax-free allowance together (and roll NI into income tax, too): if you earn just enough to make ends meet, you don’t pay or receive public funds; make less (through no fault of your own), get topped up, make more, you have to contribute to helping others. I hadn’t really thought about how the state pension should fit in there, but again it should be “enough to live on” - and not be adjusted at a different rate than the other figures year by year. Having the pension jump relative to everyone else’s situation is hard to justify and creates resentment.
Pensioners are by far the wealthiest demographics in the country. The median pensioner wealth is now almost £500,000 and a fifth of pensioners are millionaires.
https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/savings-accounts/average-household-savings-uk
https://fullfact.org/economy/millionaire-pensioners/
https://review42.com/uk/resources/average-net-worth-by-age-uk
https://www.fca.org.uk/publication/research/research-note-accumulation-of-wealth-in-britain.pdf
We do have some poor pensioners as well, but vast majority are incredibly well off. We have the worst intergenerational wealth inequality among all OECD countries. Our pensioners' share of the country's wealth is the highest among all OECD countries, and our young workers' share is the lowest.
You're confusing wealth and income. The discussion is NI on their income not wealth.
And forgive me for not thinking pensioners are doing well because their tiny house is worth a million due to an accident of location. It doesn't improve your life.
Owning a £1m house absolutely improves your life compared to someone who doesn't own a £1m house. You've got much less expenditure on housing than, say, your next door neighbour paying a recently taken out mortgage or rent on a similar property. And, you have a £1m asset that improves your rates on anything else (and if you absolutely need to can borrow against). It affords you many many options Vs someone who doesn't own a £1m house - even if that's only through stability of housing itself - and greatly increases your disposable income as you aren't paying for housing (this also increases your options)
You claimed pensioners one of the poorest groups:
> Aren't they one of the poorest groups in our society?
Being poor or wealthy is about wealth. That's why I countered your point with wealth stats.
> You're confusing wealth and income.
No, you confused them.
I love to compare my situation with my parents. My mom trained and worked (part-time) as a nurse, my father organised training events for a local company (with only his A-levels). When my father was 30, my parents had two children, two cars, two cats, and a third child on the way.
In contrast, my partner and I both have STEM PhDs and work in pharma R&D, no cars, no children, and at least while we are still in our 30ies would have to decide between a child or a mortgage.
Must be all the avocado toasts.
An argument you genuinely hear for why young people not being able to buy a house is that they're buying fruit and bread and that's a sign of how profligate they are. Fruit and bread isn't meant for little people apparently.
Quite an aggressive response there.
I can assure you that my parents didn't scrimp and save. But there is no reason why they should have had to, they were both working and were great parents.
Now explain to me why exactly I'm entitled? I've just pointed out how my parents had a better economic outcome 30ish years ago without further education than me and my partner have today with terminal STEM degrees. I never claimed that I was entitled to a better economic outcome?
An entire generation are having their life savings stolen by a class of rent seeking parasites. It's shameful.
Before I managed to buy a property I paid 50 thousand quid in rent. £50k that I worked hard for and I have nothing whatsoever to show for when it should have been spent buying equity in my own property.
Countless millions are in the same position and won't ever get out of it. Their entire life will be working hard in order to pay other peoples mortgages for no reason.
And what's worse is that rent is so damn high, affords you little rights to how you live in the property, and you can be turfed out with little notice. Renting property is too profitable and ignores the fact that people just need to live somewhere.
Yep. You pay way more money than you need to for a lower quality home that you can be thrown out of at a moments notice.
And our government likes the fact that so many Brits suffer this. They spend great deals of tax money taken off those who they've trapped in this system in order to maintain the system that robs them.
All whilst we sit and wait for the economic crisis it will inevitably cause when the bubble bursts.
Demand created by speculators and investors flooding a market who could all pull out at once at the slightest hint of trouble is most certainly a bubble.
Demand created by people wanting to buy a house to. . . Ya know. . . . Live in it. That's not a bubble. But thats not what's driving prices to their insane highs.
Not the full 50k but I'd have a hell of a lot more to show for it than nothing.
If the landlord provided me a service or created anything at a reasonable price I wouldn't mind. But he didn't. He didn't build the house, he didn't do anything apart from use some of the money I gave him anyway to do some repairs.
Paying that fucker 50k for making a few phone calls is disgraceful and its situation that is recreated all over the country to much worse degrees constantly.
Renting should be cheaper than buying.
Honestly I love hearing so many business types you'd normally expect to be pro-Tory absolutely slating the current situation... Only to turn around and suggest the only viable option is that we cut taxes and lower business rates...
One of the main problems for Tories who don't think the country is functioning as it should be right now is that it's becoming increasingly impossible for them to ignore the fact it is both the governance of their own party and their governing ideology that is inherently the problem in so many of the cases here. So many things in the UK have just demonstrably gotten worse in the past decade and they have either not fixed it or made it worse. In the case of housing, it is self-evident now that the current model is just completely and utterly broken.
> And people on lower wages aren't saving enough because they're not earning enough in the first place. You have to fix that problem or else the other adjustments are just wasted effort.
Nonono, silly. It’s all the Netflix and avocados. That way, pensioners can stroke their egos and pretend that this is all solely personal moral failings. So they can shit all over the workers some more.
Pensions going up by inflation, but NMW and UC not going up by the same is just cynical. If you argue that one should go up, then all three need to. You can't separate them like this, at least not honestly.
People think high wages causes inflation but they don't. Letting obscene wealth be controlled by a few parties is actual what causes inflation because they control the economy and start sucking wealth out of everyone by raising prices. There's no competition.
If wages are high, taxes revenue is high, which in turn supports the NHS, public transit, pubic services and the pension. Wages should be high and corporate profits (shareholder dividends) low. Wealth should be reasonably evenly distributed and the bell curve be flattened with the ends of absolute poverty and billionaires removed.
The minimum wage has gone up substantially in the last decade, one of the few good tory policies. I think it's pretty high relative to most countries, as a proportion of median income that is.
The issue is housing, everytime the minimum wage has gone up the landlords just raise rent by that amount because there is a shortage in housing in the UK. Until this is fixed it doesn't matter how much money you give to poor people it will just lead to increased rents and poor people no better off.
And we're already a small island with the highest population density of any comparable country in Europe. If you look specifically at England then the picture gets far more extreme.
Hence why sane people say we should start looking at restricting immigration rather than "just keep building lol" as though that's an infinite solution.
If you advocate for open borders, as 99% of the naive kids on these types of UK subs do, don't complain when there's not enough housing or social housing. This is what you wanted. Although I'm sick of the way the older generations are treated like they're the only ones who matter in this country, at least they aren't the ones voting for open borders and then demanding more housing.
> And we're already a small island with the highest population density of any comparable country in Europe. If you look specifically at England then the picture gets far more extreme.
Population density of the Netherlands: 508 people per km\^2
Population density of England: 428 people per km\^2
So put simply you are wrong.
Now look outside europe and there are plenty of places with a higher population density than the UK.
> Hence why sane people say we should start looking at restricting immigration rather than "just keep building lol" as though that's an infinite solution.
Sane people understand we have an aging population which requires more taxes and workers to pay pensions and run the NHS and social care system. We need immigrants here to pay those taxes. Unless you want sky high taxes on an ever shrinking number of young people which will be unsustainable, immigration is no choice.
That is why the tories despite talking the talk on restricting immigration have continued to let record numbers in, we need them to balance the tax base.
No we need more houses and we need to increase the density of housing in our urban centres, we have far far far too much suburbia and we build crap flats, build high quality high density urban housing whereby people don't need a car and you can support far more people.
> If you advocate for open borders, as 99% of the naive kids on these types of UK subs do, don't complain when there's not enough housing or social housing.
I don't advocate for open borders but I am realistic and understand british fertility rates are well below replacement rates so we need substantial numbers of immigrants to ensure the long term stability of the state and ensure that when we get old pensions are still paid and the NHS and social care system is well staffed.
> Although I'm sick of the way the older generations are treated like they're the only ones who matter in this country, at least they aren't the ones voting for open borders and then demanding more housing.
So imagine you got your way and no more immigrants entered the country, now you personally and a much smaller group of people have to pay vastly higher taxes to pay for the tens of millions of pensioners that are shortly to be added, enjoy having your taxes doubled.
> There's no discussion of increasing the minimum wage, reducing companies' reliance on zero hours contacts and push for better terms and conditions as well as for unionisation in order to better boost t&c.
There was a lot of discussion about FoM and the EU facilitating businesses desire for cheaper labour.
Your pay is tied to how difficult you are to replace not what value bring. If businesses can replace their workers with ease, then the value of labour is virtually zero, you have no bargaining power.
We should increase the minimum wage but it won't solve the problem of labour being cheap. The only reason we have a minimum wage in the first place is because the market is so tilted in favour of the employer that it's needed to stop you being paid less than what a true free market would give you.
You can't be against agency workers and pro-union whilst being in favour of the massive neoliberal project designed to reduce the labour costs for business...
Mick Lynch was right with his Brexit stance.
Free movement of workers is an essential counterbalance to free movement of goods and capital. If goods and capital can move then production will move to lower cost areas, causing job losses in the higher cost areas (see deindustrialization). This leads to unemployment and greater competition for jobs, leading to depressed wages in the high cost area. We see a race to the bottom on wages and workers conditions as people and areas compete for jobs. If workers are also able to move however then they will seek to do so from low wage areas to higher wage areas. This creates pressure in the low wage areas to increase wages and conditions to retain workers. Gradually we see an increase in wages across the entire area (although this will be less apparent or even non-existant in existing high wage areas). Instead of a race to the bottom competing for jobs we see a race to the top competing for workers.
What if we don't allow free movement of goods, capital, or people? Then be prepared for the increase in the price of goods to offset any increase in wages.
> What if we don't allow free movement of goods, capital, or people? Then be prepared for the increase in the price of goods to offset any increase in wages.
How? I thought migrants had zero affect on wages or conditions? Prices would remain the same right? You can't have it both ways.
Because we don't make everything we consume in this country so if we make it harder for goods to move either through tariffs or quotas then we increase the price of those goods. This can also increase the price of domestically produced goods if they use foreign inputs (e.g. a car made in the UK will include components and materials from abroad).
Your options are: 1) No free movement of people or goods = prices go up 2) Free movement of goods but not people = jobs move abroad, unemployment goes up, wages go down (see NAFTA) 3) Free movement of goods and people = in demand workers move to higher wage areas, pushes up living standards in the poorer parts of the free movement area and eventually leads to higher living standards across the entire area.
No but workers from those industries are competing against those in industries where jobs have gone overseas. An out of work factory worker may try to reskill as a construction worker. Not to mention that with higher unemployment there may be less demand for luxuries such as eating out or building new homes. Everything in the economy is interconnected, that's why you can't oversimplify or just view things in a vacuum.
You complain about the market not being a "true free market" but then propose making the market less free by limiting the ability of workers to move in search of better pay and conditions. How do limiting worker freedoms create a "truer" and more worker friendly market?
I never complained that we don’t have a free market lmao. My point is the exact opposite, allowing FoM was by definition state intervention and put the public in shit position.
People from poor countries move abroad, rich ones don’t. What we have is an extremely one sided agreement where Eastern Europeans get a massive step up and we get slightly cheaper strawberries and shit wages.
Allowing FoM is the very opposite of State intervention, immigration controls are state intervention as it is the state intervening to place barriers to trade.
They won't talk about that because it doesn't fit with the rhetoric they want to push. As far as they are concerned the problems they have are the direct fault of anyone over 45, however once they themselves get to that age it will all change.
>But the desire for the younger generation to have a better life unites us. Old people care about the opportunities their children and grandchildren will have
Based on empirical data, this is false.
It’s probably true if you look for instances of people helping their own children specifically. I was given help buying a house by my parents and if I think about it, so were most of people in the older millennial bracket that I know.
I’m not saying that excuses a lack of wider political help or that it scales.
Imagine having a massive majority and not finally taking on the group that honestly are ruining the British economy. There's literally no excuse not to have pushed planning reform through - tell the MPs that protested to go away like Blair used to do. Likewise with the state pension age, get that ramped up and use pension credit rather than the state pension to deal with pensioner poverty.
FPTP has enabled all of this. When New Zealand needed to make reforms to the agricultural sector, they changed the voting system so they stopped being over-represented. It has worked wonders for the New Zealand economy and the farming industry.
>There's literally no excuse not to have pushed planning reform through
It seems to have been genuinely planned, but the Liberal Democrats winning the Amersham by-election with a NIMBY candidate was the main reason it was shelved.
The problem with your post is that it amounts to a hope that the Tories were going to risk electoral suicide by attacking two huge pillars of their support - older voters and people in rural/semi-rural areas who like things the way they are. I'm sure you weren't being malicious and that you might even consider voting Tory if they made all those changes. But you considering switching your vote is not nearly enough for a party to make such attacks on its base when opposition mounts.
Planning reform and considering a more sustainable way of paying benefits to/taxing retirees are certainly good ideas. But as I have to keep reminding people on the sub, when the Tories have tried to do the right thing in the areas you mentioned they got punished. And it doesn't help when the Opposition jump on the bandwagon.
Theresa May's plan on the costs of social care, even if some people would have preferred higher taxes on rich people, was the fairest way of dealing with the rising cost to the country of older people that has been planned by a sitting government for decades. No one would have been made to sell up in their lifetimes, and inheritors would have had £100,000 guaranteed from the sale of any house. Yes, poorer pensioners get to pass on less wealth than wealthier people, but a) that's always been the case and b) this sub routinely rails against inherited wealth anyway.
The proposal fell apart largely because the Opposition jumped on the chance to damage May, irrespective of the positive aspects of the plan and the consequences of it being revoked. Now there will never be any attempts to charge pensioners more for their care for the next several years.
It's the same with planning reform and infrastructure. HS2 appears to be wildly unpopular with many Tory seats, especially in the Amersham seat. But instead of supporting a policy their party backs nationally, it appears the Liberal Democrat went on a hard NIMBY platform. I'm not exactly sure what would happen if the Liberal Democrats were in some sort of governing pact with a Labour minority government - would the new MP be forced at gunpoint to vote for planning reform or be allowed to block it if the votes were close?
In short, the Tories have tried to make changes on both the issue of planning reform and pensioners and got badly bitten. Therefore, whether we like it or not, these will more likely than not be issues left to the next Labour government. I think planning reform has a slightly higher chance of being resurrected, but changes regarding pensioners paying more are almost certainly going to be off the cards for now.
The writing was on the wall before Amersham by election TBF after T May rallied the home counties against an algorithm that I'm almost certain she couldn't explain. Also in the Amersham by election, the Tory candidate went further than Lib Dems on NIMBYism. He literally wanted the entire constituency to be designated green belt land so no houses could be built on it. Was the Lib Dem NIMBYism annoying? Yes but the Tories was genuinely worse.
>Also in the Amersham by election, the Tory candidate went further than Lib Dems on NIMBYism.
Sure, but it was still a Tory government that brought in HS2 and was about to bring in significant planning reform. The previous Tory MP had railed against HS2 and more housing, but she'd not stopped it. What were the chances the voters would reward the Tories with another win if the main opposition candidate was offering what they wanted?
I was happy to discuss until you said pensions have been frozen. That's objectively wrong. Pensions have gone up in real terms over the last 12 years, barring one year during Covid when the triple lock was paused.
You’re ignoring the other aspect of the pension problem outlined in the article, namely *private* pension obligations that were made exceedingly generous and financially unsustainable via legislation.
>> I've made my own arrangements for retirement income that don't rely on the UK state pension,
And the problem with asking most people to do this is? If they have the resources to pay into a pension then why shouldn’t they? Most people have done what you’ve done and aren’t reliant on a U.K. state pension, so why do they need the state pension rate increased?
>Pensioners are getting fucked over just as much as the young working class.
This is not true in any regard. They're not getting an amazing lifestyle, but they're getting a much much better deal than everyone else.
But the people currently pensioned off almost always aren't on state pensions? They generally ended up on final salary package pensions offered by their employers that were and are totally unaffordable.
This completely fails to take into account private pensions, savings from the prosperous last few decades, and mortgages paid off when such a thing was remotely possible.
We spend over £100 billion every year just on the state pension.
That £185 a week really adds up and it's young working people paying taxes paying for it.
Don't bother trying to explain. Few here are interested. The prevalent view is that people on a state pension are living the high life. You can't move for them at the Ritz drinking all the afternoon tea and scoffing all the cakes.
Having run out of easy scapegoats - the EU, immigrants, scroungers etc. your granny is the latest focus of attention for blame and the parasite that is holding the country back.
It's the rich picking our pockets, not your grandad and granny. But with the right wing press distracting everyone with divide and conquer tactics I guarantee that's not going to end any time soon.
I expect euthanasia clinics will be opening in due course. I'll be one of the first to sign up. The stink coming from some sections of society is getting too much for me.
I had such hope for us when I was younger. I have none anymore.
Here's amthe thing, don't expect sympathy for a group of people who had everything handed to them on easy mode.
I have no doubt there are pensioners living in rented accommodation on just the state pension, here's the thing, they fucked up, they had every opportunity to be in a considerably better financial position at this point, and they chose not to.
Even then, they are still better off than today's youth, they have actually managed to retire.
And they are far outweighed by those on obscenely generous final salary pensions, currently enjoying their 20th+ year if retirement because they called it a day at 50.
Today's youth don't have those opportunities, they are instead playing life on hard mode, unable to save for their own future, and the ones falling on really hard times receive lower state support than those pensioners.
Start taxing the latter group of pensioners fully, the same as the rest of us, balance out pensions and UC by merging the systems, then we can all have a conversation about increasing how much poor pensioners get by uplifting everyone in need of state support.
If you think the majority of pensioners retired at 50 on fat final salary pensions after a life lived on easy mode you have been drinking the Kool Aid and your attention is being diverted away from the real pigs with their noses in the trough.
Other countries manage it better and they are not as wealthy as the UK. What's the secret? In 74 the higher rate of tax was 84%. Today it is 50%. In 76 the basic rate of tax was 35%. Today it is 20%.
So yes, the tax system needs to be overhauled, but if you want a better society *everyone* needs to pay more tax, not just specific groups.
Aren’t they just buying off the old so they can continue to protect the rich, if young people voted and were broadly right leaning they’d buy their vote to continue protecting the rich oh and starve the oldie’s
I don’t think this tells the full story
Whilst the triple lock is returning (I wouldn’t argue against this, ensuring we can live comfortably in old age is surely a benefit) the age at which even that generation can claim is being steadily pushed further away, with the expectation that this will continue.
This seems like a deliberately divisive article, the target for our ire shouldn’t be the state pension (lest we give these fuckers another reason to cut a social safety net). It should be exploitative employers and rampant landlordism
1 in 5 pensioner households are millionaires. Why should taxes on working people be raised at the same time as giving a huge rise in benefits to millionaires?
Plenty of pensioners are in poverty. Targeting help where it makes a difference (eg higher pensioner credits) would be far fairer.
Last week’s announcement of the return of the triple lock for pensions makes it clear where real political power lies in Britain. Pensioners are promised a 10 per cent increase next year, matching inflation, while basic pay is rising at just 4 per cent.
This is the latest example of a deep-seated trend: our country is tilted to favour the old over the young. Older people, notably the postwar “baby boomers”, born between 1946 and 1964, have the money and the power. The young are facing a future of low pay, high rent, few incentives and much uncertainty — with the government seemingly unprepared to do anything about it.
Analysis by the Resolution Foundation shows that benefit changes since 2010 have cut the incomes of working households with children by an average of £375 per year. Yet pensioners have enjoyed an average gain of £510 per year. That is the effect of the triple lock. Even without increasing total spending on benefits, we could allocate the money we have more equitably between the generations.
We all want older people to have a fair deal and it is right that there should be inflation protection for pensions next year. But the triple lock is far more generous than that. It guarantees that state pensions will increase by inflation or the rise in average earnings or 2.5 per cent, whichever is the highest. The state pension is on a remorseless upward ratchet. Instead it should be linked to earnings in the long term, swapping to prices in periods of high inflation then allowing earnings to catch up when inflation falls.
Defenders of the triple lock point out that many pensioners need the cash. That may have been true in the past, but today the poorest 20th percentile of pensioners are about £1,500 a year better off than the poorest 20th percentile of working-age households.
While pensioners’ incomes surge, younger people’s earnings are stagnating. A 30-year-old today earns no more than a 30-year-old did ten or 15 years ago, partly because young people are more concentrated in lower-paid occupations.
Sometimes older people say the young waste money — too many flat whites and smashed avocado on sourdough, runs the tiresome cliché. But actually the big surge in discretionary spending on eating out or foreign holidays is among the boomers. Young people spend much of their pay cheque on rent — not least to boomers in the buy-to-let market.
Healthcare and pensions are the two biggest costs for the welfare state. As the boomers age, health spending could rise by £50 billion a year over the next decade on top of inflation and pension spending of £25 billion a year. If we borrow it will land the younger generation in debt. Or we could increase taxes on workers. It all boils down to the state taking money from the young to spend on the old — many of whom are better off than them.
Over the past four decades, total personal wealth — including houses and pensions — has ballooned from about three times the national income to about eight times. This changes Britain profoundly. It is now harder to become wealthy through work alone. Inheritance matters much more — though the most common age to inherit is a hardly youthful 61. Society is unequal and blocked. We are a long way from a fair, property-owning democracy. Some say this is the life cycle: old people have always owned more than the young. But the old are doing unusually well; the young, unusually badly.
Up to 75 per cent of older people are homeowners. For younger people, the figure has halved from a peak of 50 per cent in the early 1990s. The surge in house prices is not just due to that new loft conversion. Restrictive planning rules and quantitative easing have boosted the wealth of one generation of homeowners.
It is the same story with company pensions. Legislation over decades made them so generous — and expensive — that they are closed to new members.
The Conservative Party has become the party of property owners. Conservatives preach limited government while collecting votes from those who receive the most public spending. Young people see no prospect of getting a stake in society.
Political and market power favours the biggest cohort of a population: in our case, the boomers. As they grow older, they continue to shape Britain in their own interest. Increasingly, politicians are recognising the truth of this analysis. The difficulty is what to do about it.
Our society is more diverse than ever. But the desire for the younger generation to have a better life unites us. Old people care about the opportunities their children and grandchildren will have. Young people don’t want to see Granny miserable either.
There is a lot we can do. We should help young people become homeowners. Planning restrictions should be eased to build more homes and mortgage borrowing regulations loosened. They are much stricter than when the boomers were starting out.
It’s great that many more young people are saving into an auto-enrolled pension. But they are saving too little: we must boost contributions from them, employers and the exchequer. Graduates have to contribute 9 per cent of their income above a given threshold to pay for their university education: after that debt is paid the payments could continue into a pension instead unless they opt out.
Council tax should be reformed to fall less heavily on the young renting low-value properties compared with affluent people in high-value ones. If tax rises are necessary to fund the NHS and pensions, they should be generationally fair too — with less from young people’s earnings and more from older people’s assets.
We can give young people a kickstart with a capital grant when they reach the age of 30 to save or use as a deposit for a flat or to start a business. And we need to make it easier for younger people — who tend to move around more — to get on the electoral register. Politicians would then have to pay them more attention.
I don’t believe in generational war: intergenerational exchange and solidarity is what holds society together. This weekend at Glastonbury the 80-year-old Sir Paul McCartney is due to perform, and so is Billie Eilish, 20, the youngest ever solo headliner. If only the rest of society would share the stage too.
*David Willetts is a former Conservative minister, and president of the Resolution Foundation. His book The Pinch is published by Atlantic*
Yeah, they are the lowest, it’s the other golden benefits most of the current pensioners have, that the youth of today will not have and continue to prop up without recourse.
What golden benefits? Final salary pensions is a start, but let’s also say we’re still paying for their governments housing decision from the 80s and beyond. As a bonus their once in a generation events were once a generation during their work lives that didn’t stifle their earnings for an unprecedented period.
Yes, there are poor pensioners, but that doesn’t change the fact that as a cohort, they have much more disposable cash than full time workers.
Edit: Grammar
>British pensions remain among the lowest in developed countries as percent of GDP.
British *state pensions*. That's a somewhat disingenuous portrayal of that stat though.
They're that low because private pension provision in this country is comparatively much higher than our peers, because property ownership in older age is comparatively much higher here and because unlike other countries pensioners in this country receive many more benefits than just the state pension. For the poorest pensioner state pension will only actually account for around 60% of their income.
This comparison gets brought up all the time as some sort of justification for pensioners continuing to receive a plum deal and it's simply utter tosh.
No, it isn't. Assuming a single pensioner, with zero retirement savings, assets or private pension, living on their own, with no disabilities, paying national average rent (i.e. someone who is going to be representative of the poorest percentiles) as well as their £9627 a year state pension they'd also be eligible for at least an additional £13,100 a year alone just between council tax payments and housing benefit, not including extra pension credits they may be eligible for or the various other benefits they may be entitled to.
So altogether that's almost £5000 above what a FT NMW yearly salary is. If anything having checked it my initial estimate of 60% was too generous - for the poorest pensioners they receive the majority of their income not from the state pension. As long as they're claiming everything they're entitled to it is impossible for a pensioners income to fall below NMW.
To add to the other comment they also get a lot of additional subsidies and such that other countries don't enjoy like the fuel allowance and free travel on public transport. Just comparing monthly pension payments doesn't give you the full picture.
>British pensions remain among the lowest in developed countries as percent of GDP.
Sure but that's not the same thing as the share of income going to pensioners.
Today's pensioners substantially *underfunded* the previous generation. That's why poverty used to be so high among pensioners. That was today's pensioners chance to "pay in" and they blew it, leaving thousands of old people (many of them veterans of WWII etc.) to die in cold and hunger.
They will get a better deal than that which they gave to their parents' generation, but not because they "paid in".
No, it's not her. My Nan, God bless her heart, refused to use right to buy to purchase her council house because she remembered sharing a room in a slum with another family (divided by a curtain!) as a young mother and how getting a council house changed her life. She wanted that house to remain available to another young family who was up against it. Once she passed the next family what moved in immediately used right to buy, which I don't blame them for, because why wouldn't you?
We're not talking about my Nan, who was a nippy in Lyon's Teahouse (that's how she met my grandad, he was a porter) and had this internalised belief of "I know my place" (not an exaggeration, she'd literally come out with that and judge my Dad for having "ideas" - before she was a nippy, she was in service).
We're talking about the general trend of an elderly population who overwhelmingly own property that has massively increased in value since they purchased it when wages didn't keep up with it, who benefitted from the policies of the 1980s, who have effectively hoarded wealth and by virtue of population demographics effectively hold working people to ransom with their own interests.
There'll always be an old dear eeking by in a bedsit. Doesn't mean we aren't trapped in a gerontocracy.
Yeah no shit. My mates who were lucky enough to have wealthy parents who helped them to buy joke about how their flats earned more in the last year than they did.
I was ‘lucky’ enough to buy a property 5ish years ago (I’m 31) with a mix of savings and held inheritance from a grandparent passing when I was 19. - Without that I wouldn’t have been able to get on the ladder that early and feel blessed for it now. I’m genuinely terrified for everyone in my gen and younger who lose 2 thirds of their income to rent and risk burnout working against the odds with riser costs and house prices to (if they’re lucky) have the security of their own home. I’m already stressed and somewhat brunt-out myself lately, I can’t imagine what it’s like living like this, on a knife-edge, little upward mobility, it’s soul crushing!
Does anyone honestly believe business has more influence in Whitehall than pensioners do? Both parties keep private sector business leaders because they (correctly for what it's worth) think the country would collapse without them not because they are secret string pullers ruling through corruption or whatever. They didn't even have that kind of power in 1884 much less now when the power of the mass-electoral retirement aristocracy is greater than even the titled landholding aristocracy's ever was
I think pensioners and business leaders are on the same side so it doesn’t really matter. In the eternal class war between capital and labour they’re both on the side of capital trying to extract as much value from the working sector of the population as possible. It all boils down to class interests in the end.
>It's not some Gran in a bedsit who's calling the shots. It's rich Tory donors.
They both have 1 vote however come the GE - and getting that grey vote - who are more inclined to go out and cast their votes is a huge boon - The Torys need nannas who think that they're a safe pair of hands, who listen to the news, heck read newspappers and don't question when they're told Labour are scary commies
Increasing state pension isn't the problem. Not increasing other things is.
Not the old folks that are the issue here (other than their voting patterns). It's the Tories that are.
This... Interesting though isn't it, that now they're throwing pensioners under the bus, are they going to have anyone left to sacrifice except their own people.
I remember just a couple of weeks ago the UK was going nuts for its 90s something head of state that sat there for 70 years. It’s clearly what the people wants these days.
It’s not a pensions boost; it’s pensions maintenance.
This is all part of the false narrative to keep the working class divided among imaginary lines ( old v young, public sector v private, workers v unemployed).
Britain is not a a gerontocracy, it’s an oligarchy.
Except the retired generation largely voted for this shit. Along with brexit. Also we shut down our entire economy to keep these people alive and now reaping the results of that.
They aren't alongside me in that bucket.
While I don’t disagree, it is a bit hard to not feel like the elderly have it out for younger people considering the voting history over the past 10 years.
We’ve been branded the avocado toast whingers who expect hand outs by the grey vote. Which if anyone did half the maths they would see is not true and most people just want a stable job and home.
I agree we need to unify as a country to get rid of the toxicity in Westminster but I just don’t see older people getting over that but of propaganda which is now so ingrained.
That’s the thing, we (as a country) CAN offer it to public workers.
It would require higher taxation on the millionaires and billionaires though, which is verboten under this government, which is why there’s so much resistance.
That’s entirely disingenuous.
Long-term structural spending of that magnitude would require increases in taxes for ordinary working people (think similar to tax rates in mainland Europe, which are higher and start at a lower threshold level).
Taking NHS workers as an example. Inflation adjusted, most are earning around 20-25% less than in 2008. The economy has grown since then. If it was affordable then, why can't it be affordable now?
Aging population you say? Then taxes need to be raised for ordinary working people for them, not the public sector workers. Stop framing things with the wrong context.
Increases in other government expenditure (the massive interest costs from the huge debts taken on in 2008 being the best example) and lower tax take due to higher 0% thresholds and 0% rates for certain types of income would account for it being less affordable to pay the same now, before even looking at overall staff numbers.
All I’m saying is that if you wanted to redress the balance then there isn’t a mythical “other” group that can pay for it, it’s big enough that there will need to be higher taxes for everyone.
I agree that more taxes would be required, but too many people use your wording to frame it public sector workers asking for _more_. They aren't, they're asking for restoration to baseline. Others are asking for more, yet the ire seems to skirt them handily.
No scaremongering here. I just don’t believe you can set out a credible way to fund a 10% increase in most categories of public spending without raising taxes on ordinary people.
It’s lazy to just hand wave and say that the “millionaires” can pay for your ideas without setting out how.
>When everyone else is getting shafted. It's the equivalent to a boost.
That's not quite how the world works.
You're not getting poorer if someone gets a raise, bloody hell, what a world view.
Yep. And weirdly it’s making people want to attack pensions which would mean young people of today don’t even benefit from pensions tomorrow. There is clearly prioritisation of pensions from tories because of where votes come from; but to fix the divide we need to maintain pensions AND fix all the other issues neoliberal capitalism has broken for younger people.
General strike now!
The young people of today don't care because they've already planned their future with an absence of state pension in mind. That's the consequence of the older generation punching down, they've engineered a situation where everyone now economically supporting them feels content that they don't have anything to lose cutting that support.
Pointless comment that ignores opportunity cost is a thing.
Pensions expenditure, alongside ancillary benefits that also mostly get spent on older people, is one of the largest expenses we have as a state that for the past 20 years has been unable to effectively manage its balance sheet, and those expenses are only going to balloon further, even if we *don't* bung 10% increases to them every year.
Having a frank an honest conversation about the affordability of that and whether there is better uses for that money for working people is perfectly reasonable and not some oligarchic conspiracy theory.
The full new State Pension is £185.15 per week.
The only reasons you can get more than the full State Pension are if:
you have over a certain amount of Additional State Pension. you defer
(delay) taking your State Pension.
Not if you exclude equity in your home it doesn't. Asset rich pensioners will continue to get all the benefits/pensions/etc., cash rich renters on the other hand...
These things either need to be universal, or we systematically undo the pedestal we put homeowners. Everything else just ends up protecting the financially secure and rinsing the financially precarious.
It already is for a lot of things, e.g. Pension Credit. Unless that culture of regarding a person's house as untouchable changes, those same rules would be the baseline for a means-tested State Pension.
Pension Credit is means-tested so that you get less of it if you have savings of £10,000 or higher. But value of your home isn't part of the calculation.
If you're renting with £100,000 in the bank, you'll get less than someone living in a £750,000 house with £5,000 in the bank.
Means testing is awful. It creates perverse incentives that result in programmes getting axed by most voters that don't benefit, as well as creating really perverse incentives in certain income brackets as clawbacks/losses of benefits start, leading to very high effective marginal tax brackets (often higher than we tax the richest).
The right way is to give benefits to as many as possible, then just increase progressive taxation rates so those who don't need those benefits are still neutral or more than paying for themselves.
This is what happens when the people making these policies are approaching retirement years themselves.
They are looking to protect their near term future interests, rather than the younger generations.
**AND** if you are engaged in such warfare, particularly if you are a young person blaming pensioners for your woes, then you should stop because it's fucking stupid.
If it isn't obvious where the blame lies by now then frankly you are part of the problem.
I started paying NI at 16 and worked without breaks in PAYE non tax dodge jobs until I was 65. State pension £670 a month starting at 66. Thanks. My working class ( hard physical work in shitty industrial engineering jobs) dad and father in law died at 55 and 71. Probably industrial related diseases. Again life long PAYE and NI payers. So six years of a crap state pension between them.
I understand your feelings, but what you paid in paid for pensioners then. It wasn’t a pot for you to draw down on. You were promised something that was not sustainable. Why must that promise be kept only at the expense of fucking over the young now?
I’m 35, there is absolutely no way there will be a non means-tested state pension when I get to it. Why do you think there is mandatory workplace pensions now?
I think the assumption among young people has been, and still is, that if you want a pension you have to start paying for it now. That's what I'm doing.
You'll probably end up with near nothing anyway, because of the demographics and debt crisis alone.
Personally I think pensions will remain into the distant future, but they will be small, people with private pensions funds will be ok, others will be working long past their pensions age.
The state pension isn't fucking over the young, but people like you are.
Unless you have a generous private pension plan, you'll need the state pension to survive. Attacking the state pention without owning property and having a ton of savings is just shitting on your future self.
Mind you, by the time you're in your 40s-50s the boomers will be dead and millenials will be the largest generation. They'll see how many GenX pensioners are living in poverty and demand that the state pension be increased.
Just like the boomers did in the '90s.
Why do you think I’m attacking the state pension? Why do you think I’m I want pensioners to be poor? I’m asking why younger people have to bear all the brunt of cuts. The tax base is a finite and changing sum, there isn’t infinite money to be able to pay for everything (although apparently there is if it’s for bailing out banks).
>They'll see how many GenX pensioners are living in poverty and demand that the state pension be increased.
As someone on the cusp of GenX - you do know many of us don't have property, we're priced out, don't have extensive savings, no incentive and no means & poor pensions, I can't afford much more than my company pension and that's not gonna cut it
I suspect retirement will be 70+ by the time I get there, I just suspect I won't make it.....as many won't, poor diet, stressed, tiered and defeated - thoes that do, well they'll get a crummy grannyflat for 10 - 15 years then probably some for profit bare bones basic care home to die
Sounds lovely doesn't it
This is such a shitty reply. People with low working incomes in the UK get shafted when they become pensioners but the fluffy caring young lefties suddenly don't care because they're pensioners.
[Pensioner poverty is a problem ](https://www.jrf.org.uk/data/pensioner-poverty-rates)
Sigh. Better paid middle income workers paid more NI and taxes all their lives to subsidise lower paid workers. So pay more to give to others eg 'poor' pensioners. The very rich ( a couple of million) and the mega rich ( 300,000) won't be affected.
That’s how tax works though isn’t it? The problem with this that I see is that by linking pensions (paid for by NI from wages) to inflation, but saying wages can’t got up by that just means outgoings rising at a greater rate than incomings. It simply isn’t sustainable.
Ok but careful what you wish for or you can go American: an It's my pension money and stuff the poor eg opt out of NI and lower taxes approach. No doubt about it, the US is a vibrant place to make a living unless you're poor. At the moment middle income Brits 'agree' to pay for poor peoples' pensions. Again I don't mean the very rich- they don't have any money or income, they have assets and wealth which is hard to tax without also hitting those on 50-100k pay who....pay lots in NI and tax already.
If they wanted to fix pensioner poverty in the mean time, instead of taxing the youth into more troubles, just means test the state pension. This way they can use the increased pot to boost it for current poorer pensioners.
What a load of shit. Britain is run for rich paid for by the poor. Do not listen to this shit trying to make out pensioners are the problem. Capitalism is.
So let’s target them with specific support than giving a universal uplift to a demographic that is in a better position than the working age population
(Roughly) 75% of pensioners own their own home.
Looks like they need to start downsizing, young people would have to do the same, so I don’t see why it’s any different for someone who is older.
Not how it works. And the question isn’t ‘why are they receiving a pension’ it’s ‘why is their pension getting such a significant income boost at a time when the government claims to be unable to afford pay increases for teachers, nurses etc’. Don’t conflate the two.
It isn’t a private piggy bank, otherwise a lot of them would’ve run it dry by now. They paid into the system to support the (much smaller) elderly generation before them, currently working people are paying in to support them.
State pensions are paid for by current tax receipts, not previous ones. Nobody paid into anything.
It’s something that is supposed to bind working age people with retirees.
That pact was broken a long time ago and is going to reverberate for generations to come now. I’m not sure how this country (and many others) come back from this.
>But if you're suggesting that the solution is to cheat current pensioners out of their pensions
Why should a pensioner sat on a £1mil estate be given a bung of £600 a month paid for by someone scraping by on £18,000 a year?
The only "cheating" going on here is the delusional notion that the wealthy middle classes receiving handouts from hard workers below the poverty line themselves somehow *isn't* cheating, and that nothing should be done about it because there happen to be some pensioners below the poverty line.
20% of the entire population are pensioners. That’s 19 million people. So 15.2 million are receiving a 10% income increase that they don’t particularly need. That’s more than there are nurses or teachers in the country. Why are the wealthiest cohort receiving this additional income over anyone else?
You’re supposed to be scaling back in your retirement. They shouldn’t be the best earning years of your life. It’s bonkers.
Old people tend to vote more in elections
Young people tend vote less
Therefore the elected government ends up representing old people more than young people
Here we go with the Tories media trying to set off infighting with the little people. Stop believing this bullshit. The crimes in this country are down to the workers rights erosion, and the way the high earners are reaping more and more cash at our expense. This is very evident by the way the media are demonising the unions and those fighting for a stake in life.
Stop believing this stupid bullshit.
Why not just euthenise the over-60s? That would please all the young people. Plus, they would have the comforting knowledge that *they,* too, wouldn't be a burden on future generations. :D
"Love you mum, now get in the damn box 'cause you're a drain on society."
Maybe if people were paid a living wage, and governments stopped lining the pockets of multi-billion pound corporations people would be able to afford to live and own a home. But, nah, that's a stoopid idea.
Example of what, I think you would need to find evidence of a pension pot that the government has put aside and is investing for future workers to claim.
As for the services - there used to be bobbies on the beat, neighbourhood police who could deal with small incidents, that springs to mind.
Accessible public transport, a decent council housing stock would be two more.
No it isn't, it's partially funded by the precept. But, of the £774m incresse that was "available to policing" at final police settlement, only £200m was from the assumption all PCCs increased their precept by the (pretty munch mandated) £10 vs £550 from an increase in government grant. Council tax makes up around 40% of total police funding, with some areas (Surrey) as high as 55%, and Northumberland as little as 18%. The majority of funding is centrally funded, and should be.
Source: Police funding is my job.
OH look bash some section of society rather than fix the problem for all society.
Divide and conquer yet again.
It has only ever been the rich and powerful vs the rest of us peons, and the rich and powerful can only rule if they divide and put people in little sections they can set each to blame the other.
Remember, pensioners suffered disproportionally under covid sometimes helped deliberately by moving infectious pensioners out of hospital and into close proximity with other pensioners, occasionally killing off whole residential homes in short order. Remember with this government where there is smoke there is usually fire ,.....or perhaps a party.
The number of deluded people in this post is ridiculous.
A very large percentage of pensioners live in poverty.
The politics of idiocy is strong - those who have contributed their whole life being damned by many who have contributed nothing.
How rich they’ll be on £10K a year pension…….
Many people live not too many years beyond retirement and their total take out after decades of paying in is a pittance.
Divide and conquer and rely on idiots to spread the message.
I don't see why you would have said the same thing, given that at that time your generation was leaving far more pensioners to live in squalor and deprivation:
[http://conhome.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/150325-Pensioner-poverty.png](http://conhome.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/150325-Pensioner-poverty.png)
Snapshot of _How Britain became a gerontocracy || The pensions boost is further proof that Britain is run for the benefit of the older generation — paid for by the young_ : An archived version can be found [here.](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-britain-became-a-gerontocracy-qrr086jtt) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
We can charge NI on pensioner incomes and use those additional funds to increase the pension credit (not the state pension) to help poorer pensioners. That would be fair and a good policy. What we can't do is charge additional NI on working class while increasing the state pension for all pensioners, when over 80% of them are wealthy and don't need it at a time when all income of the working class are going down in real terms.
Or we just apply the exact same "lock", whatever we decide it is, so that NMW, UC, and state pension all increase by the same percentage. I'm fine with the state pension going up. Just not *only* the state pension going up.
I’ve long wanted some equality there: peg minimum wage, benefit cap and the tax-free allowance together (and roll NI into income tax, too): if you earn just enough to make ends meet, you don’t pay or receive public funds; make less (through no fault of your own), get topped up, make more, you have to contribute to helping others. I hadn’t really thought about how the state pension should fit in there, but again it should be “enough to live on” - and not be adjusted at a different rate than the other figures year by year. Having the pension jump relative to everyone else’s situation is hard to justify and creates resentment.
Yeah good point.
80% of pensioners are wealthy ????? Seriously ????
40% are millionaires.
Made me laugh, that one.
>when over 80% of them are wealthy Aren't they one of the poorest groups in our society?
No. There’s lots of pensioners in poverty, but a lower number compared to many other groups. Over 1 in 5 pensioner households are millionaires.
Pensioners are by far the wealthiest demographics in the country. The median pensioner wealth is now almost £500,000 and a fifth of pensioners are millionaires. https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/savings-accounts/average-household-savings-uk https://fullfact.org/economy/millionaire-pensioners/ https://review42.com/uk/resources/average-net-worth-by-age-uk https://www.fca.org.uk/publication/research/research-note-accumulation-of-wealth-in-britain.pdf We do have some poor pensioners as well, but vast majority are incredibly well off. We have the worst intergenerational wealth inequality among all OECD countries. Our pensioners' share of the country's wealth is the highest among all OECD countries, and our young workers' share is the lowest.
You're confusing wealth and income. The discussion is NI on their income not wealth. And forgive me for not thinking pensioners are doing well because their tiny house is worth a million due to an accident of location. It doesn't improve your life.
Owning a £1m house absolutely improves your life compared to someone who doesn't own a £1m house. You've got much less expenditure on housing than, say, your next door neighbour paying a recently taken out mortgage or rent on a similar property. And, you have a £1m asset that improves your rates on anything else (and if you absolutely need to can borrow against). It affords you many many options Vs someone who doesn't own a £1m house - even if that's only through stability of housing itself - and greatly increases your disposable income as you aren't paying for housing (this also increases your options)
You claimed pensioners one of the poorest groups: > Aren't they one of the poorest groups in our society? Being poor or wealthy is about wealth. That's why I countered your point with wealth stats. > You're confusing wealth and income. No, you confused them.
[удалено]
I love to compare my situation with my parents. My mom trained and worked (part-time) as a nurse, my father organised training events for a local company (with only his A-levels). When my father was 30, my parents had two children, two cars, two cats, and a third child on the way. In contrast, my partner and I both have STEM PhDs and work in pharma R&D, no cars, no children, and at least while we are still in our 30ies would have to decide between a child or a mortgage. Must be all the avocado toasts.
An argument you genuinely hear for why young people not being able to buy a house is that they're buying fruit and bread and that's a sign of how profligate they are. Fruit and bread isn't meant for little people apparently.
[удалено]
Quite an aggressive response there. I can assure you that my parents didn't scrimp and save. But there is no reason why they should have had to, they were both working and were great parents. Now explain to me why exactly I'm entitled? I've just pointed out how my parents had a better economic outcome 30ish years ago without further education than me and my partner have today with terminal STEM degrees. I never claimed that I was entitled to a better economic outcome?
Wasn’t meant to be aggressive. I read it as oh my parents were only “this”… and we are “this”.
[удалено]
I wouldn’t go that far. That said… having to choose between a child and a mortgage…what is the world coming to ?
Young people aren't saving enough because housing costs are too high. It's artificially screwing everything.
An entire generation are having their life savings stolen by a class of rent seeking parasites. It's shameful. Before I managed to buy a property I paid 50 thousand quid in rent. £50k that I worked hard for and I have nothing whatsoever to show for when it should have been spent buying equity in my own property. Countless millions are in the same position and won't ever get out of it. Their entire life will be working hard in order to pay other peoples mortgages for no reason.
And what's worse is that rent is so damn high, affords you little rights to how you live in the property, and you can be turfed out with little notice. Renting property is too profitable and ignores the fact that people just need to live somewhere.
Yep. You pay way more money than you need to for a lower quality home that you can be thrown out of at a moments notice. And our government likes the fact that so many Brits suffer this. They spend great deals of tax money taken off those who they've trapped in this system in order to maintain the system that robs them. All whilst we sit and wait for the economic crisis it will inevitably cause when the bubble bursts.
And when you're thrown out the only options are other flats that cost even more
If the bubble looks like bursting, Tories will just spend BILLIONS more propping up the housing bubble.
Demand is not a bubble
Demand created by speculators and investors flooding a market who could all pull out at once at the slightest hint of trouble is most certainly a bubble. Demand created by people wanting to buy a house to. . . Ya know. . . . Live in it. That's not a bubble. But thats not what's driving prices to their insane highs.
Demand isn't people, it's how much *money* is chasing housing, and it's almost entirely dependent on what's going on with finance.
Why couldn’t you get mortgage?
Difficulty saving a deposit whilst paying rent and low affordability multiples coupled with rising house prices I'm guessing.
[удалено]
I've got a mortgage It's just not my sodding mortgage.
It's banks who've made the real money by lending against inflated mortgages. Should have kept to 3 times salary and we'd all be sorted!
In the time between putting an offer on my house and moving in I paid more rent than my deposit.
"well how else is the person stealing tens of thousands off you supposed to pay their bills!?"
[удалено]
Not the full 50k but I'd have a hell of a lot more to show for it than nothing. If the landlord provided me a service or created anything at a reasonable price I wouldn't mind. But he didn't. He didn't build the house, he didn't do anything apart from use some of the money I gave him anyway to do some repairs. Paying that fucker 50k for making a few phone calls is disgraceful and its situation that is recreated all over the country to much worse degrees constantly. Renting should be cheaper than buying.
Literally everything comes back to housing costs.
Yep, keeps everyone enslaved. The more you earn, the more we take.
Honestly I love hearing so many business types you'd normally expect to be pro-Tory absolutely slating the current situation... Only to turn around and suggest the only viable option is that we cut taxes and lower business rates...
One of the main problems for Tories who don't think the country is functioning as it should be right now is that it's becoming increasingly impossible for them to ignore the fact it is both the governance of their own party and their governing ideology that is inherently the problem in so many of the cases here. So many things in the UK have just demonstrably gotten worse in the past decade and they have either not fixed it or made it worse. In the case of housing, it is self-evident now that the current model is just completely and utterly broken.
> And people on lower wages aren't saving enough because they're not earning enough in the first place. You have to fix that problem or else the other adjustments are just wasted effort. Nonono, silly. It’s all the Netflix and avocados. That way, pensioners can stroke their egos and pretend that this is all solely personal moral failings. So they can shit all over the workers some more.
And even when I do manage to save, runaway inflation means a significant portion of that is effectively just vanishing into the ether
Pensions going up by inflation, but NMW and UC not going up by the same is just cynical. If you argue that one should go up, then all three need to. You can't separate them like this, at least not honestly.
And more young people earning higher wages means more tax revenue to spend on the old gudgies.
People think high wages causes inflation but they don't. Letting obscene wealth be controlled by a few parties is actual what causes inflation because they control the economy and start sucking wealth out of everyone by raising prices. There's no competition. If wages are high, taxes revenue is high, which in turn supports the NHS, public transit, pubic services and the pension. Wages should be high and corporate profits (shareholder dividends) low. Wealth should be reasonably evenly distributed and the bell curve be flattened with the ends of absolute poverty and billionaires removed.
The minimum wage has gone up substantially in the last decade, one of the few good tory policies. I think it's pretty high relative to most countries, as a proportion of median income that is. The issue is housing, everytime the minimum wage has gone up the landlords just raise rent by that amount because there is a shortage in housing in the UK. Until this is fixed it doesn't matter how much money you give to poor people it will just lead to increased rents and poor people no better off.
And we're already a small island with the highest population density of any comparable country in Europe. If you look specifically at England then the picture gets far more extreme. Hence why sane people say we should start looking at restricting immigration rather than "just keep building lol" as though that's an infinite solution. If you advocate for open borders, as 99% of the naive kids on these types of UK subs do, don't complain when there's not enough housing or social housing. This is what you wanted. Although I'm sick of the way the older generations are treated like they're the only ones who matter in this country, at least they aren't the ones voting for open borders and then demanding more housing.
> And we're already a small island with the highest population density of any comparable country in Europe. If you look specifically at England then the picture gets far more extreme. Population density of the Netherlands: 508 people per km\^2 Population density of England: 428 people per km\^2 So put simply you are wrong. Now look outside europe and there are plenty of places with a higher population density than the UK. > Hence why sane people say we should start looking at restricting immigration rather than "just keep building lol" as though that's an infinite solution. Sane people understand we have an aging population which requires more taxes and workers to pay pensions and run the NHS and social care system. We need immigrants here to pay those taxes. Unless you want sky high taxes on an ever shrinking number of young people which will be unsustainable, immigration is no choice. That is why the tories despite talking the talk on restricting immigration have continued to let record numbers in, we need them to balance the tax base. No we need more houses and we need to increase the density of housing in our urban centres, we have far far far too much suburbia and we build crap flats, build high quality high density urban housing whereby people don't need a car and you can support far more people. > If you advocate for open borders, as 99% of the naive kids on these types of UK subs do, don't complain when there's not enough housing or social housing. I don't advocate for open borders but I am realistic and understand british fertility rates are well below replacement rates so we need substantial numbers of immigrants to ensure the long term stability of the state and ensure that when we get old pensions are still paid and the NHS and social care system is well staffed. > Although I'm sick of the way the older generations are treated like they're the only ones who matter in this country, at least they aren't the ones voting for open borders and then demanding more housing. So imagine you got your way and no more immigrants entered the country, now you personally and a much smaller group of people have to pay vastly higher taxes to pay for the tens of millions of pensioners that are shortly to be added, enjoy having your taxes doubled.
> There's no discussion of increasing the minimum wage, reducing companies' reliance on zero hours contacts and push for better terms and conditions as well as for unionisation in order to better boost t&c. There was a lot of discussion about FoM and the EU facilitating businesses desire for cheaper labour. Your pay is tied to how difficult you are to replace not what value bring. If businesses can replace their workers with ease, then the value of labour is virtually zero, you have no bargaining power. We should increase the minimum wage but it won't solve the problem of labour being cheap. The only reason we have a minimum wage in the first place is because the market is so tilted in favour of the employer that it's needed to stop you being paid less than what a true free market would give you. You can't be against agency workers and pro-union whilst being in favour of the massive neoliberal project designed to reduce the labour costs for business... Mick Lynch was right with his Brexit stance.
Free movement of workers is an essential counterbalance to free movement of goods and capital. If goods and capital can move then production will move to lower cost areas, causing job losses in the higher cost areas (see deindustrialization). This leads to unemployment and greater competition for jobs, leading to depressed wages in the high cost area. We see a race to the bottom on wages and workers conditions as people and areas compete for jobs. If workers are also able to move however then they will seek to do so from low wage areas to higher wage areas. This creates pressure in the low wage areas to increase wages and conditions to retain workers. Gradually we see an increase in wages across the entire area (although this will be less apparent or even non-existant in existing high wage areas). Instead of a race to the bottom competing for jobs we see a race to the top competing for workers. What if we don't allow free movement of goods, capital, or people? Then be prepared for the increase in the price of goods to offset any increase in wages.
> What if we don't allow free movement of goods, capital, or people? Then be prepared for the increase in the price of goods to offset any increase in wages. How? I thought migrants had zero affect on wages or conditions? Prices would remain the same right? You can't have it both ways.
Because we don't make everything we consume in this country so if we make it harder for goods to move either through tariffs or quotas then we increase the price of those goods. This can also increase the price of domestically produced goods if they use foreign inputs (e.g. a car made in the UK will include components and materials from abroad). Your options are: 1) No free movement of people or goods = prices go up 2) Free movement of goods but not people = jobs move abroad, unemployment goes up, wages go down (see NAFTA) 3) Free movement of goods and people = in demand workers move to higher wage areas, pushes up living standards in the poorer parts of the free movement area and eventually leads to higher living standards across the entire area.
How does a restaurant or a construction worker get made abroad? Not all jobs to over seas.
No but workers from those industries are competing against those in industries where jobs have gone overseas. An out of work factory worker may try to reskill as a construction worker. Not to mention that with higher unemployment there may be less demand for luxuries such as eating out or building new homes. Everything in the economy is interconnected, that's why you can't oversimplify or just view things in a vacuum.
Increased pre-fabrication reducing the amount of on site work is the answer to the second one
You complain about the market not being a "true free market" but then propose making the market less free by limiting the ability of workers to move in search of better pay and conditions. How do limiting worker freedoms create a "truer" and more worker friendly market?
I never complained that we don’t have a free market lmao. My point is the exact opposite, allowing FoM was by definition state intervention and put the public in shit position. People from poor countries move abroad, rich ones don’t. What we have is an extremely one sided agreement where Eastern Europeans get a massive step up and we get slightly cheaper strawberries and shit wages.
Allowing FoM is the very opposite of State intervention, immigration controls are state intervention as it is the state intervening to place barriers to trade.
They won't talk about that because it doesn't fit with the rhetoric they want to push. As far as they are concerned the problems they have are the direct fault of anyone over 45, however once they themselves get to that age it will all change.
>But the desire for the younger generation to have a better life unites us. Old people care about the opportunities their children and grandchildren will have Based on empirical data, this is false.
It’s probably true if you look for instances of people helping their own children specifically. I was given help buying a house by my parents and if I think about it, so were most of people in the older millennial bracket that I know. I’m not saying that excuses a lack of wider political help or that it scales.
Imagine having a massive majority and not finally taking on the group that honestly are ruining the British economy. There's literally no excuse not to have pushed planning reform through - tell the MPs that protested to go away like Blair used to do. Likewise with the state pension age, get that ramped up and use pension credit rather than the state pension to deal with pensioner poverty. FPTP has enabled all of this. When New Zealand needed to make reforms to the agricultural sector, they changed the voting system so they stopped being over-represented. It has worked wonders for the New Zealand economy and the farming industry.
>There's literally no excuse not to have pushed planning reform through It seems to have been genuinely planned, but the Liberal Democrats winning the Amersham by-election with a NIMBY candidate was the main reason it was shelved. The problem with your post is that it amounts to a hope that the Tories were going to risk electoral suicide by attacking two huge pillars of their support - older voters and people in rural/semi-rural areas who like things the way they are. I'm sure you weren't being malicious and that you might even consider voting Tory if they made all those changes. But you considering switching your vote is not nearly enough for a party to make such attacks on its base when opposition mounts. Planning reform and considering a more sustainable way of paying benefits to/taxing retirees are certainly good ideas. But as I have to keep reminding people on the sub, when the Tories have tried to do the right thing in the areas you mentioned they got punished. And it doesn't help when the Opposition jump on the bandwagon. Theresa May's plan on the costs of social care, even if some people would have preferred higher taxes on rich people, was the fairest way of dealing with the rising cost to the country of older people that has been planned by a sitting government for decades. No one would have been made to sell up in their lifetimes, and inheritors would have had £100,000 guaranteed from the sale of any house. Yes, poorer pensioners get to pass on less wealth than wealthier people, but a) that's always been the case and b) this sub routinely rails against inherited wealth anyway. The proposal fell apart largely because the Opposition jumped on the chance to damage May, irrespective of the positive aspects of the plan and the consequences of it being revoked. Now there will never be any attempts to charge pensioners more for their care for the next several years. It's the same with planning reform and infrastructure. HS2 appears to be wildly unpopular with many Tory seats, especially in the Amersham seat. But instead of supporting a policy their party backs nationally, it appears the Liberal Democrat went on a hard NIMBY platform. I'm not exactly sure what would happen if the Liberal Democrats were in some sort of governing pact with a Labour minority government - would the new MP be forced at gunpoint to vote for planning reform or be allowed to block it if the votes were close? In short, the Tories have tried to make changes on both the issue of planning reform and pensioners and got badly bitten. Therefore, whether we like it or not, these will more likely than not be issues left to the next Labour government. I think planning reform has a slightly higher chance of being resurrected, but changes regarding pensioners paying more are almost certainly going to be off the cards for now.
The writing was on the wall before Amersham by election TBF after T May rallied the home counties against an algorithm that I'm almost certain she couldn't explain. Also in the Amersham by election, the Tory candidate went further than Lib Dems on NIMBYism. He literally wanted the entire constituency to be designated green belt land so no houses could be built on it. Was the Lib Dem NIMBYism annoying? Yes but the Tories was genuinely worse.
>Also in the Amersham by election, the Tory candidate went further than Lib Dems on NIMBYism. Sure, but it was still a Tory government that brought in HS2 and was about to bring in significant planning reform. The previous Tory MP had railed against HS2 and more housing, but she'd not stopped it. What were the chances the voters would reward the Tories with another win if the main opposition candidate was offering what they wanted?
[удалено]
I was happy to discuss until you said pensions have been frozen. That's objectively wrong. Pensions have gone up in real terms over the last 12 years, barring one year during Covid when the triple lock was paused.
You’re ignoring the other aspect of the pension problem outlined in the article, namely *private* pension obligations that were made exceedingly generous and financially unsustainable via legislation. >> I've made my own arrangements for retirement income that don't rely on the UK state pension, And the problem with asking most people to do this is? If they have the resources to pay into a pension then why shouldn’t they? Most people have done what you’ve done and aren’t reliant on a U.K. state pension, so why do they need the state pension rate increased?
>Pensioners are getting fucked over just as much as the young working class. This is not true in any regard. They're not getting an amazing lifestyle, but they're getting a much much better deal than everyone else.
Pensioners are getting fucked over? I’ve seen enough crazy already today and it’s not even midday.
But the people currently pensioned off almost always aren't on state pensions? They generally ended up on final salary package pensions offered by their employers that were and are totally unaffordable.
This completely fails to take into account private pensions, savings from the prosperous last few decades, and mortgages paid off when such a thing was remotely possible.
We spend over £100 billion every year just on the state pension. That £185 a week really adds up and it's young working people paying taxes paying for it.
Don't bother trying to explain. Few here are interested. The prevalent view is that people on a state pension are living the high life. You can't move for them at the Ritz drinking all the afternoon tea and scoffing all the cakes. Having run out of easy scapegoats - the EU, immigrants, scroungers etc. your granny is the latest focus of attention for blame and the parasite that is holding the country back. It's the rich picking our pockets, not your grandad and granny. But with the right wing press distracting everyone with divide and conquer tactics I guarantee that's not going to end any time soon. I expect euthanasia clinics will be opening in due course. I'll be one of the first to sign up. The stink coming from some sections of society is getting too much for me. I had such hope for us when I was younger. I have none anymore.
Here's amthe thing, don't expect sympathy for a group of people who had everything handed to them on easy mode. I have no doubt there are pensioners living in rented accommodation on just the state pension, here's the thing, they fucked up, they had every opportunity to be in a considerably better financial position at this point, and they chose not to. Even then, they are still better off than today's youth, they have actually managed to retire. And they are far outweighed by those on obscenely generous final salary pensions, currently enjoying their 20th+ year if retirement because they called it a day at 50. Today's youth don't have those opportunities, they are instead playing life on hard mode, unable to save for their own future, and the ones falling on really hard times receive lower state support than those pensioners. Start taxing the latter group of pensioners fully, the same as the rest of us, balance out pensions and UC by merging the systems, then we can all have a conversation about increasing how much poor pensioners get by uplifting everyone in need of state support.
If you think the majority of pensioners retired at 50 on fat final salary pensions after a life lived on easy mode you have been drinking the Kool Aid and your attention is being diverted away from the real pigs with their noses in the trough. Other countries manage it better and they are not as wealthy as the UK. What's the secret? In 74 the higher rate of tax was 84%. Today it is 50%. In 76 the basic rate of tax was 35%. Today it is 20%. So yes, the tax system needs to be overhauled, but if you want a better society *everyone* needs to pay more tax, not just specific groups.
Aren’t they just buying off the old so they can continue to protect the rich, if young people voted and were broadly right leaning they’d buy their vote to continue protecting the rich oh and starve the oldie’s
I don’t think this tells the full story Whilst the triple lock is returning (I wouldn’t argue against this, ensuring we can live comfortably in old age is surely a benefit) the age at which even that generation can claim is being steadily pushed further away, with the expectation that this will continue. This seems like a deliberately divisive article, the target for our ire shouldn’t be the state pension (lest we give these fuckers another reason to cut a social safety net). It should be exploitative employers and rampant landlordism
1 in 5 pensioner households are millionaires. Why should taxes on working people be raised at the same time as giving a huge rise in benefits to millionaires? Plenty of pensioners are in poverty. Targeting help where it makes a difference (eg higher pensioner credits) would be far fairer.
Last week’s announcement of the return of the triple lock for pensions makes it clear where real political power lies in Britain. Pensioners are promised a 10 per cent increase next year, matching inflation, while basic pay is rising at just 4 per cent. This is the latest example of a deep-seated trend: our country is tilted to favour the old over the young. Older people, notably the postwar “baby boomers”, born between 1946 and 1964, have the money and the power. The young are facing a future of low pay, high rent, few incentives and much uncertainty — with the government seemingly unprepared to do anything about it. Analysis by the Resolution Foundation shows that benefit changes since 2010 have cut the incomes of working households with children by an average of £375 per year. Yet pensioners have enjoyed an average gain of £510 per year. That is the effect of the triple lock. Even without increasing total spending on benefits, we could allocate the money we have more equitably between the generations. We all want older people to have a fair deal and it is right that there should be inflation protection for pensions next year. But the triple lock is far more generous than that. It guarantees that state pensions will increase by inflation or the rise in average earnings or 2.5 per cent, whichever is the highest. The state pension is on a remorseless upward ratchet. Instead it should be linked to earnings in the long term, swapping to prices in periods of high inflation then allowing earnings to catch up when inflation falls. Defenders of the triple lock point out that many pensioners need the cash. That may have been true in the past, but today the poorest 20th percentile of pensioners are about £1,500 a year better off than the poorest 20th percentile of working-age households. While pensioners’ incomes surge, younger people’s earnings are stagnating. A 30-year-old today earns no more than a 30-year-old did ten or 15 years ago, partly because young people are more concentrated in lower-paid occupations. Sometimes older people say the young waste money — too many flat whites and smashed avocado on sourdough, runs the tiresome cliché. But actually the big surge in discretionary spending on eating out or foreign holidays is among the boomers. Young people spend much of their pay cheque on rent — not least to boomers in the buy-to-let market. Healthcare and pensions are the two biggest costs for the welfare state. As the boomers age, health spending could rise by £50 billion a year over the next decade on top of inflation and pension spending of £25 billion a year. If we borrow it will land the younger generation in debt. Or we could increase taxes on workers. It all boils down to the state taking money from the young to spend on the old — many of whom are better off than them. Over the past four decades, total personal wealth — including houses and pensions — has ballooned from about three times the national income to about eight times. This changes Britain profoundly. It is now harder to become wealthy through work alone. Inheritance matters much more — though the most common age to inherit is a hardly youthful 61. Society is unequal and blocked. We are a long way from a fair, property-owning democracy. Some say this is the life cycle: old people have always owned more than the young. But the old are doing unusually well; the young, unusually badly. Up to 75 per cent of older people are homeowners. For younger people, the figure has halved from a peak of 50 per cent in the early 1990s. The surge in house prices is not just due to that new loft conversion. Restrictive planning rules and quantitative easing have boosted the wealth of one generation of homeowners. It is the same story with company pensions. Legislation over decades made them so generous — and expensive — that they are closed to new members. The Conservative Party has become the party of property owners. Conservatives preach limited government while collecting votes from those who receive the most public spending. Young people see no prospect of getting a stake in society. Political and market power favours the biggest cohort of a population: in our case, the boomers. As they grow older, they continue to shape Britain in their own interest. Increasingly, politicians are recognising the truth of this analysis. The difficulty is what to do about it. Our society is more diverse than ever. But the desire for the younger generation to have a better life unites us. Old people care about the opportunities their children and grandchildren will have. Young people don’t want to see Granny miserable either. There is a lot we can do. We should help young people become homeowners. Planning restrictions should be eased to build more homes and mortgage borrowing regulations loosened. They are much stricter than when the boomers were starting out. It’s great that many more young people are saving into an auto-enrolled pension. But they are saving too little: we must boost contributions from them, employers and the exchequer. Graduates have to contribute 9 per cent of their income above a given threshold to pay for their university education: after that debt is paid the payments could continue into a pension instead unless they opt out. Council tax should be reformed to fall less heavily on the young renting low-value properties compared with affluent people in high-value ones. If tax rises are necessary to fund the NHS and pensions, they should be generationally fair too — with less from young people’s earnings and more from older people’s assets. We can give young people a kickstart with a capital grant when they reach the age of 30 to save or use as a deposit for a flat or to start a business. And we need to make it easier for younger people — who tend to move around more — to get on the electoral register. Politicians would then have to pay them more attention. I don’t believe in generational war: intergenerational exchange and solidarity is what holds society together. This weekend at Glastonbury the 80-year-old Sir Paul McCartney is due to perform, and so is Billie Eilish, 20, the youngest ever solo headliner. If only the rest of society would share the stage too. *David Willetts is a former Conservative minister, and president of the Resolution Foundation. His book The Pinch is published by Atlantic*
[удалено]
Yeah, they are the lowest, it’s the other golden benefits most of the current pensioners have, that the youth of today will not have and continue to prop up without recourse. What golden benefits? Final salary pensions is a start, but let’s also say we’re still paying for their governments housing decision from the 80s and beyond. As a bonus their once in a generation events were once a generation during their work lives that didn’t stifle their earnings for an unprecedented period. Yes, there are poor pensioners, but that doesn’t change the fact that as a cohort, they have much more disposable cash than full time workers. Edit: Grammar
>British pensions remain among the lowest in developed countries as percent of GDP. British *state pensions*. That's a somewhat disingenuous portrayal of that stat though. They're that low because private pension provision in this country is comparatively much higher than our peers, because property ownership in older age is comparatively much higher here and because unlike other countries pensioners in this country receive many more benefits than just the state pension. For the poorest pensioner state pension will only actually account for around 60% of their income. This comparison gets brought up all the time as some sort of justification for pensioners continuing to receive a plum deal and it's simply utter tosh.
>For the poorest pensioner state pension will only actually account for around 60% of their income. That's still lower than minimum wage though.
No, it isn't. Assuming a single pensioner, with zero retirement savings, assets or private pension, living on their own, with no disabilities, paying national average rent (i.e. someone who is going to be representative of the poorest percentiles) as well as their £9627 a year state pension they'd also be eligible for at least an additional £13,100 a year alone just between council tax payments and housing benefit, not including extra pension credits they may be eligible for or the various other benefits they may be entitled to. So altogether that's almost £5000 above what a FT NMW yearly salary is. If anything having checked it my initial estimate of 60% was too generous - for the poorest pensioners they receive the majority of their income not from the state pension. As long as they're claiming everything they're entitled to it is impossible for a pensioners income to fall below NMW.
To add to the other comment they also get a lot of additional subsidies and such that other countries don't enjoy like the fuel allowance and free travel on public transport. Just comparing monthly pension payments doesn't give you the full picture.
>British pensions remain among the lowest in developed countries as percent of GDP. Sure but that's not the same thing as the share of income going to pensioners.
That they have paid in over decades !
A,) no you don't pay into a sum of money that's yours, it's just a tax like any other. B) not what I said.
Today's pensioners substantially *underfunded* the previous generation. That's why poverty used to be so high among pensioners. That was today's pensioners chance to "pay in" and they blew it, leaving thousands of old people (many of them veterans of WWII etc.) to die in cold and hunger. They will get a better deal than that which they gave to their parents' generation, but not because they "paid in".
They paid national insurance when they worked, which was spent when it paid in. There is no pot of assets.
Most of the current taxes didn't exist then, most income was cash in hand and they retired at 50. They did not contribute anything.
This is just designed to turn generations against each other. The responsibility overall lies with the ruling class.
Pensioners are the ruling class mate
[удалено]
Because political parties bother to appeal to their interests.
[удалено]
No, it's not her. My Nan, God bless her heart, refused to use right to buy to purchase her council house because she remembered sharing a room in a slum with another family (divided by a curtain!) as a young mother and how getting a council house changed her life. She wanted that house to remain available to another young family who was up against it. Once she passed the next family what moved in immediately used right to buy, which I don't blame them for, because why wouldn't you? We're not talking about my Nan, who was a nippy in Lyon's Teahouse (that's how she met my grandad, he was a porter) and had this internalised belief of "I know my place" (not an exaggeration, she'd literally come out with that and judge my Dad for having "ideas" - before she was a nippy, she was in service). We're talking about the general trend of an elderly population who overwhelmingly own property that has massively increased in value since they purchased it when wages didn't keep up with it, who benefitted from the policies of the 1980s, who have effectively hoarded wealth and by virtue of population demographics effectively hold working people to ransom with their own interests. There'll always be an old dear eeking by in a bedsit. Doesn't mean we aren't trapped in a gerontocracy.
If you bought a property 6 month ago it’s gone up in value
Yeah no shit. My mates who were lucky enough to have wealthy parents who helped them to buy joke about how their flats earned more in the last year than they did.
I was ‘lucky’ enough to buy a property 5ish years ago (I’m 31) with a mix of savings and held inheritance from a grandparent passing when I was 19. - Without that I wouldn’t have been able to get on the ladder that early and feel blessed for it now. I’m genuinely terrified for everyone in my gen and younger who lose 2 thirds of their income to rent and risk burnout working against the odds with riser costs and house prices to (if they’re lucky) have the security of their own home. I’m already stressed and somewhat brunt-out myself lately, I can’t imagine what it’s like living like this, on a knife-edge, little upward mobility, it’s soul crushing!
Does anyone honestly believe business has more influence in Whitehall than pensioners do? Both parties keep private sector business leaders because they (correctly for what it's worth) think the country would collapse without them not because they are secret string pullers ruling through corruption or whatever. They didn't even have that kind of power in 1884 much less now when the power of the mass-electoral retirement aristocracy is greater than even the titled landholding aristocracy's ever was
I think pensioners and business leaders are on the same side so it doesn’t really matter. In the eternal class war between capital and labour they’re both on the side of capital trying to extract as much value from the working sector of the population as possible. It all boils down to class interests in the end.
Well put.
>It's not some Gran in a bedsit who's calling the shots. It's rich Tory donors. They both have 1 vote however come the GE - and getting that grey vote - who are more inclined to go out and cast their votes is a huge boon - The Torys need nannas who think that they're a safe pair of hands, who listen to the news, heck read newspappers and don't question when they're told Labour are scary commies
Increasing state pension isn't the problem. Not increasing other things is. Not the old folks that are the issue here (other than their voting patterns). It's the Tories that are.
This... Interesting though isn't it, that now they're throwing pensioners under the bus, are they going to have anyone left to sacrifice except their own people.
I remember just a couple of weeks ago the UK was going nuts for its 90s something head of state that sat there for 70 years. It’s clearly what the people wants these days.
It’s not a pensions boost; it’s pensions maintenance. This is all part of the false narrative to keep the working class divided among imaginary lines ( old v young, public sector v private, workers v unemployed). Britain is not a a gerontocracy, it’s an oligarchy.
When everyone else is getting shafted. It's the equivalent to a boost. If we can't offer 9% to public workers we can't offer it to pensioners.
[удалено]
Except the retired generation largely voted for this shit. Along with brexit. Also we shut down our entire economy to keep these people alive and now reaping the results of that. They aren't alongside me in that bucket.
And the younger generation largely didn't vote at all. Stop making excuses and take some responsibility.
Take some responsibility for what exactly?
While I don’t disagree, it is a bit hard to not feel like the elderly have it out for younger people considering the voting history over the past 10 years. We’ve been branded the avocado toast whingers who expect hand outs by the grey vote. Which if anyone did half the maths they would see is not true and most people just want a stable job and home. I agree we need to unify as a country to get rid of the toxicity in Westminster but I just don’t see older people getting over that but of propaganda which is now so ingrained.
That’s the thing, we (as a country) CAN offer it to public workers. It would require higher taxation on the millionaires and billionaires though, which is verboten under this government, which is why there’s so much resistance.
That’s entirely disingenuous. Long-term structural spending of that magnitude would require increases in taxes for ordinary working people (think similar to tax rates in mainland Europe, which are higher and start at a lower threshold level).
Taking NHS workers as an example. Inflation adjusted, most are earning around 20-25% less than in 2008. The economy has grown since then. If it was affordable then, why can't it be affordable now? Aging population you say? Then taxes need to be raised for ordinary working people for them, not the public sector workers. Stop framing things with the wrong context.
Increases in other government expenditure (the massive interest costs from the huge debts taken on in 2008 being the best example) and lower tax take due to higher 0% thresholds and 0% rates for certain types of income would account for it being less affordable to pay the same now, before even looking at overall staff numbers. All I’m saying is that if you wanted to redress the balance then there isn’t a mythical “other” group that can pay for it, it’s big enough that there will need to be higher taxes for everyone.
I agree that more taxes would be required, but too many people use your wording to frame it public sector workers asking for _more_. They aren't, they're asking for restoration to baseline. Others are asking for more, yet the ire seems to skirt them handily.
[удалено]
No scaremongering here. I just don’t believe you can set out a credible way to fund a 10% increase in most categories of public spending without raising taxes on ordinary people. It’s lazy to just hand wave and say that the “millionaires” can pay for your ideas without setting out how.
>When everyone else is getting shafted. It's the equivalent to a boost. That's not quite how the world works. You're not getting poorer if someone gets a raise, bloody hell, what a world view.
Yep. And weirdly it’s making people want to attack pensions which would mean young people of today don’t even benefit from pensions tomorrow. There is clearly prioritisation of pensions from tories because of where votes come from; but to fix the divide we need to maintain pensions AND fix all the other issues neoliberal capitalism has broken for younger people. General strike now!
The young people of today don't care because they've already planned their future with an absence of state pension in mind. That's the consequence of the older generation punching down, they've engineered a situation where everyone now economically supporting them feels content that they don't have anything to lose cutting that support.
Pointless comment that ignores opportunity cost is a thing. Pensions expenditure, alongside ancillary benefits that also mostly get spent on older people, is one of the largest expenses we have as a state that for the past 20 years has been unable to effectively manage its balance sheet, and those expenses are only going to balloon further, even if we *don't* bung 10% increases to them every year. Having a frank an honest conversation about the affordability of that and whether there is better uses for that money for working people is perfectly reasonable and not some oligarchic conspiracy theory.
The full new State Pension is £185.15 per week. The only reasons you can get more than the full State Pension are if: you have over a certain amount of Additional State Pension. you defer (delay) taking your State Pension.
And you can bet by the time I get to be a pensioner, it'll have been sorted out and flipped around.
This whole thing is solved if pension / related benefits is means tested.
Not if you exclude equity in your home it doesn't. Asset rich pensioners will continue to get all the benefits/pensions/etc., cash rich renters on the other hand... These things either need to be universal, or we systematically undo the pedestal we put homeowners. Everything else just ends up protecting the financially secure and rinsing the financially precarious.
Why would home value be excluded from means testing?
It already is for a lot of things, e.g. Pension Credit. Unless that culture of regarding a person's house as untouchable changes, those same rules would be the baseline for a means-tested State Pension. Pension Credit is means-tested so that you get less of it if you have savings of £10,000 or higher. But value of your home isn't part of the calculation. If you're renting with £100,000 in the bank, you'll get less than someone living in a £750,000 house with £5,000 in the bank.
Means testing is awful. It creates perverse incentives that result in programmes getting axed by most voters that don't benefit, as well as creating really perverse incentives in certain income brackets as clawbacks/losses of benefits start, leading to very high effective marginal tax brackets (often higher than we tax the richest). The right way is to give benefits to as many as possible, then just increase progressive taxation rates so those who don't need those benefits are still neutral or more than paying for themselves.
This is what happens when the people making these policies are approaching retirement years themselves. They are looking to protect their near term future interests, rather than the younger generations.
No it is not, the Times, as you well know. This is just more class warfare, setting the poor against the weak.
And?..
**AND** if you are engaged in such warfare, particularly if you are a young person blaming pensioners for your woes, then you should stop because it's fucking stupid. If it isn't obvious where the blame lies by now then frankly you are part of the problem.
The problem is the tories - who votes for the tories?
Yea. It's the bloody foreigners! Right?
I started paying NI at 16 and worked without breaks in PAYE non tax dodge jobs until I was 65. State pension £670 a month starting at 66. Thanks. My working class ( hard physical work in shitty industrial engineering jobs) dad and father in law died at 55 and 71. Probably industrial related diseases. Again life long PAYE and NI payers. So six years of a crap state pension between them.
I understand your feelings, but what you paid in paid for pensioners then. It wasn’t a pot for you to draw down on. You were promised something that was not sustainable. Why must that promise be kept only at the expense of fucking over the young now?
Careful what you wish for. We’ll end up with nothing when we hit retirement age.
I’m 35, there is absolutely no way there will be a non means-tested state pension when I get to it. Why do you think there is mandatory workplace pensions now?
And whatever sum is left will have any student loans deducted from it no doubt
We expect nothing less.
I think the assumption among young people has been, and still is, that if you want a pension you have to start paying for it now. That's what I'm doing.
I think you'll find most young people are already planning their future with that outcome in mind. It's not really a threat at this point.
You'll probably end up with near nothing anyway, because of the demographics and debt crisis alone. Personally I think pensions will remain into the distant future, but they will be small, people with private pensions funds will be ok, others will be working long past their pensions age.
I think you'll find most young people are already planning their future with that outcome in mind. It's not really a threat at this point.
The state pension isn't fucking over the young, but people like you are. Unless you have a generous private pension plan, you'll need the state pension to survive. Attacking the state pention without owning property and having a ton of savings is just shitting on your future self. Mind you, by the time you're in your 40s-50s the boomers will be dead and millenials will be the largest generation. They'll see how many GenX pensioners are living in poverty and demand that the state pension be increased. Just like the boomers did in the '90s.
Why do you think I’m attacking the state pension? Why do you think I’m I want pensioners to be poor? I’m asking why younger people have to bear all the brunt of cuts. The tax base is a finite and changing sum, there isn’t infinite money to be able to pay for everything (although apparently there is if it’s for bailing out banks).
>They'll see how many GenX pensioners are living in poverty and demand that the state pension be increased. As someone on the cusp of GenX - you do know many of us don't have property, we're priced out, don't have extensive savings, no incentive and no means & poor pensions, I can't afford much more than my company pension and that's not gonna cut it I suspect retirement will be 70+ by the time I get there, I just suspect I won't make it.....as many won't, poor diet, stressed, tiered and defeated - thoes that do, well they'll get a crummy grannyflat for 10 - 15 years then probably some for profit bare bones basic care home to die Sounds lovely doesn't it
This is such a shitty reply. People with low working incomes in the UK get shafted when they become pensioners but the fluffy caring young lefties suddenly don't care because they're pensioners. [Pensioner poverty is a problem ](https://www.jrf.org.uk/data/pensioner-poverty-rates)
I’m not saying pensioners should be poor. How about we make the benefits means tested?
Sigh. Better paid middle income workers paid more NI and taxes all their lives to subsidise lower paid workers. So pay more to give to others eg 'poor' pensioners. The very rich ( a couple of million) and the mega rich ( 300,000) won't be affected.
That’s how tax works though isn’t it? The problem with this that I see is that by linking pensions (paid for by NI from wages) to inflation, but saying wages can’t got up by that just means outgoings rising at a greater rate than incomings. It simply isn’t sustainable.
Ok but careful what you wish for or you can go American: an It's my pension money and stuff the poor eg opt out of NI and lower taxes approach. No doubt about it, the US is a vibrant place to make a living unless you're poor. At the moment middle income Brits 'agree' to pay for poor peoples' pensions. Again I don't mean the very rich- they don't have any money or income, they have assets and wealth which is hard to tax without also hitting those on 50-100k pay who....pay lots in NI and tax already.
If they wanted to fix pensioner poverty in the mean time, instead of taxing the youth into more troubles, just means test the state pension. This way they can use the increased pot to boost it for current poorer pensioners.
More children live in poverty than pensioners
What a load of shit. Britain is run for rich paid for by the poor. Do not listen to this shit trying to make out pensioners are the problem. Capitalism is.
20% of pensioners are defined as being in poverty btw.
So let’s target them with specific support than giving a universal uplift to a demographic that is in a better position than the working age population
(Roughly) 75% of pensioners own their own home. Looks like they need to start downsizing, young people would have to do the same, so I don’t see why it’s any different for someone who is older.
Why are we giving the other 80% handouts then?
Because they have paid in to the system throughout their working life?
Not how it works. And the question isn’t ‘why are they receiving a pension’ it’s ‘why is their pension getting such a significant income boost at a time when the government claims to be unable to afford pay increases for teachers, nurses etc’. Don’t conflate the two.
It isn’t a private piggy bank, otherwise a lot of them would’ve run it dry by now. They paid into the system to support the (much smaller) elderly generation before them, currently working people are paying in to support them.
State pensions are paid for by current tax receipts, not previous ones. Nobody paid into anything. It’s something that is supposed to bind working age people with retirees. That pact was broken a long time ago and is going to reverberate for generations to come now. I’m not sure how this country (and many others) come back from this.
[удалено]
If we can retroactively shaft university students and workers, we can retroactively change the state pension scheme to fix other societal issues.
>But if you're suggesting that the solution is to cheat current pensioners out of their pensions Why should a pensioner sat on a £1mil estate be given a bung of £600 a month paid for by someone scraping by on £18,000 a year? The only "cheating" going on here is the delusional notion that the wealthy middle classes receiving handouts from hard workers below the poverty line themselves somehow *isn't* cheating, and that nothing should be done about it because there happen to be some pensioners below the poverty line.
20% of the entire population are pensioners. That’s 19 million people. So 15.2 million are receiving a 10% income increase that they don’t particularly need. That’s more than there are nurses or teachers in the country. Why are the wealthiest cohort receiving this additional income over anyone else? You’re supposed to be scaling back in your retirement. They shouldn’t be the best earning years of your life. It’s bonkers.
>20% of the entire population are pensioners That's a bit fucking concerning isn't it.
And out of all the people in poverty, they’re the ones who are lowest priority, as they have had the most opportunity to escape
Old people tend to vote more in elections Young people tend vote less Therefore the elected government ends up representing old people more than young people
Here we go with the Tories media trying to set off infighting with the little people. Stop believing this bullshit. The crimes in this country are down to the workers rights erosion, and the way the high earners are reaping more and more cash at our expense. This is very evident by the way the media are demonising the unions and those fighting for a stake in life. Stop believing this stupid bullshit.
Why not just euthenise the over-60s? That would please all the young people. Plus, they would have the comforting knowledge that *they,* too, wouldn't be a burden on future generations. :D "Love you mum, now get in the damn box 'cause you're a drain on society." Maybe if people were paid a living wage, and governments stopped lining the pockets of multi-billion pound corporations people would be able to afford to live and own a home. But, nah, that's a stoopid idea.
Carousel time!
And who do most pensioners vote for?....
So someone that has worked and paid tax all their life is having their pension funded by someone that has just started work paying minimal tax ?
Yes, it isn't put into a magic pension fund, its a pyramid scheme. Edit: They paid for their decent public services that no longer exist.
Example
Example of what, I think you would need to find evidence of a pension pot that the government has put aside and is investing for future workers to claim. As for the services - there used to be bobbies on the beat, neighbourhood police who could deal with small incidents, that springs to mind. Accessible public transport, a decent council housing stock would be two more.
Police is council tax
No it isn't, it's partially funded by the precept. But, of the £774m incresse that was "available to policing" at final police settlement, only £200m was from the assumption all PCCs increased their precept by the (pretty munch mandated) £10 vs £550 from an increase in government grant. Council tax makes up around 40% of total police funding, with some areas (Surrey) as high as 55%, and Northumberland as little as 18%. The majority of funding is centrally funded, and should be. Source: Police funding is my job.
OH look bash some section of society rather than fix the problem for all society. Divide and conquer yet again. It has only ever been the rich and powerful vs the rest of us peons, and the rich and powerful can only rule if they divide and put people in little sections they can set each to blame the other. Remember, pensioners suffered disproportionally under covid sometimes helped deliberately by moving infectious pensioners out of hospital and into close proximity with other pensioners, occasionally killing off whole residential homes in short order. Remember with this government where there is smoke there is usually fire ,.....or perhaps a party.
The country was locked down primarily to protect that age bracket right?
Paywall is further proof of old people
And
Time to eliminate all pensions then. Let the younger generation reap the rewards of it
The number of deluded people in this post is ridiculous. A very large percentage of pensioners live in poverty. The politics of idiocy is strong - those who have contributed their whole life being damned by many who have contributed nothing. How rich they’ll be on £10K a year pension……. Many people live not too many years beyond retirement and their total take out after decades of paying in is a pittance. Divide and conquer and rely on idiots to spread the message.
Except us oldies were once young….and we said the same things you are…
I don't see why you would have said the same thing, given that at that time your generation was leaving far more pensioners to live in squalor and deprivation: [http://conhome.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/150325-Pensioner-poverty.png](http://conhome.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/150325-Pensioner-poverty.png)