Old Before You Die? You'll Need To Be

Government Projections of a 0.1% fall in retirement costs as a % of GDP between 2010 and 2050 somehow make pensions unaffordable, apparently.

While claiming the recovery in the British economy is now firmly underway in his Autumn Statement this week, Chancellor George Osborne's Government slipped in the forecast, trailed in an anti-welfare speech he made a few days earlier, that the qualifying age for the state pension, already rising from 65 to 67, will apparently "need" to rise further to 70 and above in the coming decades. In future, Osborne has decided, if life expectancy rises, the pension age will be indexed to rise with it. Older folks are having the temerity to live longer and, if they are not working, they truly are a burden to our Not-So-Big Society, it seems.

For sometime, we have become accustomed to hearing the refrain that "it's great people are living longer, but...(we can't really afford them)." And on the face of it, it appears to be a logical argument - more people living longer but not working longer will mean an increase in costs. Sure. But there is a difference between an increase in expense and what is affordable especially if the overall economy continues to grow, which it is expected to do. For example, in the last 10 years, wealth in Britain has increased by over £60 billion, in spite of everything. But only £1 billion of this has gone to ordinary households in the form of income. The other £59 billion has gone to shareholders as dividends or higher valued stocks.

The fact is, there is plenty of wealth to go around and afford retirement, as well as pay for higher education and a range of other services for younger and middle aged people as well. In fact, projections by the Pensions Policy Institute indicate that, as a share of GDP, the cost of the current pensions system (with retirement at 65) would only rise from 5.6% in 2010 to 5.8% in 2050; while Government forecasts indicate an actual decrease of 0.1%. But of course, if fewer and fewer corporations and individuals avoid tax and Government continues to allow this, retirement costs, as well as other social benefits, will become harder to afford as although the economy might grow faster than the rate of aging, there will indeed be less public finance available. Add on top of this a Government ideologically determined to "shrink the state" and drive pensions increasingly into the arms of private finance companies, and it soon becomes obvious that the choices being foisted onto British people are not about what is affordable at all - rather, it is about priorities and the sort of society we want to see.

Why is it affordable for the state to hand out over £70 billions to just one private company to clean up its mess at Sellafield nuclear plant, or pay out £4 billions in subsidies every year to private rail companies to hand on to their shareholders in dividends, but pensions can't be afforded for ordinary people, mostly on low incomes to begin with (we are, after all, talking about state pensions, not private or occupational schemes)?

The priorities become even more troubling when you reflect that although people are living longer, not all are doing so in good health nor are they all living to the same age, and social class and income closely correlate to your chances of survival. The bottom line is that poorer people do not live as long as wealthier citizens: geographically, life expectancy at birth ranges according to one (experimental) set of ONS figures from over 93 years in wealthy Moreton Hall ward in Bury St Edmonds in West Suffolk to just 65.4 years in less well off Rooksdown ward in Basingstoke in Hampshire.

But even these are averages: there are many variations and lower paid, manual workers live shorter lives even now in the 21st century. As pointed out by another recent study of life expectancy among people who have already retired (among whom a village in Somerset comes out as the best prospect), your location itself doesn't determine your chances of survival - rather it hints at other factors, primarily your wealth and the lifestyle it affords, including access to better food, health services and environmental factors such as housing and leisure. Consequently, people in areas with lower wealth live significantly shorter lives, with healthy life expectancy in Manchester a meagre 55 years, similar to some parts of Glasgow and poor districts in other larger cities.

And so, the reality is that with our privatisation-obsessed, inequality-promoting government seducing the populace into accepting the idea of old age being supposedly unaffordable, a growing number of the poorest will not only have to wait longer to get their meagre state pension - they will need to do without it altogether.

Why? Because they will be dead.

In the Land of the Muppets

The Lib Dems technically "lost" the constituency of York at the last election - boundary changes made it notionally one of their seats, but when it came to it the Tories won by a significant margin. But that hasn't stopped them from aping the eponymous Duke of the same city in the famous children's song where he "marched them up to the top of the hill, then marched them down again."

Again and again in recent months we have seen just how appallingly bad the Coalition Government is for lack of foresight and planning. Of note - the supposedly cost-cutting student fees increases which were meant to deliver savings, except that by bringing them in at the same time as allowing universities to charge up to £9,000 a year, the cost of upfront loans is now prohibitively expensive to the Government to the tune of no less than £1,000 million per year more than anticipated.

Which the Muppet, and which the puppet?

Linked to this was their pandering to rightwing myths about non-existent social security benefits by slashing the numbers of overseas students, a move which will mean several billions lost in both education fees and money coming into the UK from abroad. Not only does this ignore the benefits to Britain of potentially influential people from other countries being educated here at their own cost, but it will possibly bankrupt some universities and deny even costly educational opportunities to British students. Now this is being reversed in a desparate attempt to shore up the gap in funding from student loans.

Then came the NHS debacle, which the Coalition's "partners" are fighting with each other over trying to claim which of them has "won" after their faux "listening exercise". And meanwhile the revised plans quietly remove the obligation on the state to provide universal healthcare to its citizens.

And now this - in the middle of negotiations on public sector pensions with the trade unions, Chief Secretary of the Treasury, Danny Alexander, jumped the gun and boldly announced to a thinktank's conference that employees' contributions would rise by 3.2% of income and members would have to work an extra year. Again, the Con Dems have echoed and pandered to myths about "gold plated" public sector pensions, when in fact the average pension paid to a public sector pensioner was just £6,500 p.a. in 2009/10  They also ignored the fact that by increasing pension contributions, it would deter many from saving in the first place, leaving the state to pay more when they did finally retire but would be entirely dependent on state pensions and benefits.

So, after an understandable outcry and threats of sustained strike action from the trade unions, what has happened now? Ooops! Danny has changed his mind and decided to go back to the table with the unions. On one level, good as it may mean some chance to stop some of this nonsense, and all power to the unions for being instrumental in achieving this.

But this is not a listening Government, as it cravenly claims each time it backtracks on some insensitivity or botch up. Rather, it is a disorganised, thoughtless and ideologically fundamentalist regime intent on rapidly "changing everything by 2015 " so deeply that it would take decades to reverse the increasingly market-orientated "reforms" introduced across the public sector at great cost to citizens' wellbeing and the public purse. Even if the public comprehensively rejects the ill-thought up "Big Society", the Coalition's rush is about ensuring that we will be stuck with it for decades to come, regardless of our wishes or the irreversible damage done to so many long established public services in the meantime.

Danny's nick name is Beaker, owing to his striking resemblance to the carrot-topped Muppet of the same name. Clearly, in the comedy of errors that passes for the Coalition, the resemblance is increasingly more than physical. Poor chap, he must be exhausted by the constant U-turning, totally out of his depth as he spins for his ungrateful Puppet Masters, Cameron and Clegg.

Appropriate indeed, then, is this performance of Coldplay's "Yellow ", a paean to anxious confusion and hesitant hurry, sung by none other than Beaker the Muppet himself. And of course, yellow is the jaundiced colour of the Lib Dems, in more than one sense.

Yep, go Danny boy...How he must miss those days thinking up press releases on red squirrel conservation for the Cairngorms national park.