- Defend the triple lock
- For pensions we can really afford to live on
- For a fully funded, fully public, comprehensive national care service
- Make the super-rich pay!
Brent Kennedy, Carlisle Socialist Party
Where do you get your hands on ready dosh if you’re too cowardly to try the banks? From little old ladies and gents – they’re a pushover!
That is the essence of Labour’s attack on the pensions triple lock, at the behest of the British Chambers of Commerce. Eventually it will mean depriving old folk of £15 billion a year and handing it over either to employers, or to profiteering private care home multinationals.
£15 billion is also the annual amount of tax relief that the government grants the highest earners for paying into pension pots which fund their enjoyable retirement lifestyles. Remember, the gap in healthy life expectancy between the wealthy and the poor has now widened to 20 years.
If Labour really cared about working-class folk they could keep the triple lock with just a 3% annual contribution from the 50 families sitting on a mountain of £500 billion. But that’s taboo for them.
British pensioners get some of the lowest pensions in Europe, just 30% of average earnings, and Burnham’s new rule will make sure it never improves on this. Whatever happened to the expectation of social progress which we baby boomers financed?
And don’t buy the cynical argument that this will benefit workers of today or tomorrow. So many are dependent today on precarious working or bogus self-employment that 43% of working-aged people can’t afford to save enough for retirement. They face a future on a paltry pension topped up by means-tested benefits, like a quarter of pensioners already. Then the bosses and bankers will claim we ‘can’t afford’ the benefits bill.
Artificially stirred-up ‘generation wars’, like divisions over race or gender, just divide us against each other and divert us from the real cause of our problems. We need working-class unity for a better life for all, by calling the billionaire class to account for once.
