Worry not, dear taxpayer, there are more bills for you to pay. Not only must you pay for the lockdown that kept you in your cramped apartment for a disease that didn’t affect you, and don’t forget the deficit payments of over £100 billion a year – really, you should just shrug it off. Even if you have your expensive degree, which creates negligible returns, and levelled with record living costs and taxation, you can of course pay for more benefits for a small minority of retired people who didn’t pay attention to changes in their state pension benefit.
Let’s be clear – in 1993 when Ken Clarke announced a change to the state pension age, there was a small group of women who chose not to read the news, listen to the radio, or communicate with anyone who was cognisant of this change for the following decade. This small group of activists now demands enquiries and taxpayer compensation.
To give the Waspis what they want is nothing but an insult to working people
There is recent news that the government may relent on its promise not to have working people pay for the demands of these protestors. To pay for the Waspi women (as they’re known), it would cost up to £10.5 billion – let’s put that into perspective. That is the government’s entire research and development budget, or three times the annual cost of maintaining our independent nuclear deterrent. What do you, dear taxpayer, think your money is better spent on?
To give the Waspis what they want – a massive taxpayer-funded dole when public funds are, to be printable, tight – is nothing but an insult to working people. Adam Smith Institute research shows that the state pension will become fiscally insolvent by 2036, without Waspi bailouts. This means that there will be no state pension for the people currently paying for it: the young people of today.
And let’s make this clear, the state pension is a benefit – it’s defined as such in the Pensions Act 2014, Section 1, Part 1, Line 1: ‘This Part creates a benefit called state pension.’ That means that there is no pot with your name on it – it is paid out of taxpayer pockets into a pensioner’s. If Waspis want to have a big pay out, it is working taxpayers who will pay for it through their National Insurance contributions (NIC) in the first instance, and other taxation if the NICs don’t cover it. Or, given the size of borrowing, our grandchildren can pay for it.
In the UK, we spend £150 billion on pensioner benefits, just £30 billion shy of what we pay for whatever we call medical care through the NHS in England. There are guaranteed increases for the NHS, according to recent briefs by the government, which will drive funding up to almost £200 billion a year. Likewise, the state pension is protected by the triple lock, rising by 4.8 per cent by next year. What protection is there for younger people?
Unfortunately there is none, and there is little wonder why young people are radicalising towards Reform UK or the Greens and Your Party. When they can’t get on the housing market or are stuck with low pay, I don’t believe that slamming another obligation to pay more benefits for pensioners is going to improve intergenerational relationships at a time of such division.
The Waspis have been ruled against by the High Court. There have also been previous commitments by the government that they won’t give into political pressure to redistribute sparse cash from younger people to asset-rich pensioners who decided against proactively finding out when the retirement age was, as over 90 per cent of their age bracket did. The government is now, it seems, looking to spare some budget blushes by appealing to this small campaign group.
Fundamentally, there is a rot at the heart of this potential U-turn by the government. For young Brits today, there is little reason to stick around and pay for these pensioner benefits. As recent polling found, 65 per cent of people under the age of 35 in the UK are thinking about moving abroad. That means exporting the investment that this country made into young people’s education, and more immigration into the UK to make up for the lost labour and talent.
As a nation, we cannot continue this way. We must rethink our state benefits policy and ignore the Waspis’ calls for more benefits. Until there is growth, we simply cannot spend another penny more on benefits, deserved or not.
Comments