Labour delegates left Brighton this week with the clear impression that their leader will depart some time in the next four years, and possibly sooner, to begin his long-awaited retirement. Mr Blair will launch himself at the annual beanos of American corporations. His speeches, doubtless on themes such as ‘Me and Dubya’ or the ‘Special Relationship’, will earn him millions, and no one will begrudge him his loot, least of all Gordon Brown. It might be worth remembering, though, that ordinary pensioners have not done as well under this government, and that for them the outlook is grim. The most telling figures on pensioner poverty produced this week did not come from the Chancellor but from 73-year-old Sylvia Hardy, jailed for a week for refusing to pay £53.71 of her council tax bill. Miss Hardy had not refused to pay her council tax full-stop. She has willingly been paying Exeter City Council £55 a month, a sum she calculates would have been the bill due on her flat had her council tax, like her pension, increased in line with the government’s inflation index over the past four years. What she refuses to pay is the extra £16 a month by which her council tax bill has risen over and above the rate of inflation. Since 2001 her council tax bill has risen 38 per cent but her pension, which is supposed to be linked to the cost of living, by just 6.8 per cent. Millions of pensioners, like Miss Hardy, are already handing more than one sixth of their state pension straight back to the public purse. Their lives are becoming impossible.
Mr Brown’s response to the plight of pensioners weighed down by council tax bills is sadly typical of the man. Scared by the effect that sharp increases in council tax were having on the government’s then preferred measure of inflation, the Retail Prices Index, he conceived a new measure, the Consumer Prices Index, which conveniently excludes council tax and indeed all housing costs. When Mr Brown boasts of low inflation, as he regularly does, he is talking about the price of luxuries such as iPods and DVD players, but not the cost of putting a roof over one’s head. For pensioners who have no interest in an iPod but face mounting bills on their homes, the Brown years have been anything but an era of low inflation. For them, life under New Labour is not so very different from life under the Labour government of the 1970s, when those on fixed incomes saw their living standards eroded at an alarming rate.
Gordon Brown claims to have compensated for pensioners’ hardships by introducing a benefit called Pension Credit, which in theory tops up the state pension to guarantee all single pensioners an income of £105.45 a week and all couples a minimum of £160.95 a week. It is on the basis of this that the Chancellor claims to have lifted a million pensioners out of poverty. Yet for many pensioners the money is illusory. Many are unaware of the benefits, do not understand the forms they need to complete in order to claim them, or feel too humiliated by being means-tested. The Department for Work and Pensions admitted in April, 18 months after the introduction of the benefits, that of the 4.25 million pensioners eligible to receive the benefits, only 2.65 million were actually claiming them. For Gordon Brown, over-complex pension credits have the agreeable outcome of making him appear generous, and allowing him to make grand claims about lifting people out of poverty, without actually having to hand over the money. Tax credits are a confidence trick which, like that of the ‘tarmac gang’ jailed for bullying elderly people into having their driveways resurfaced at extraordinary expense, exploits the confused state of vulnerable people.
The government could improve the lot of elderly people — and all others of modest means — by the simple expedient of ceasing to force local authorities to increase council tax at such a high rate. It could free councils from having to conduct ‘ethnic monitoring’ of all who use their services. It could allow councils to negotiate their own local wage deals rather than having to pass on to their staff pay increases negotiated at national level. Yet Mr Brown has been quite happy to shift the tax burden on to councils, making the calculation that aggrieved council tax payers will blame their councils rather than him.
We can all be thankful to Sylvia Hardy —who shows anything but the confused behaviour of some of Mr Brown’s elderly victims — for making it quite clear that the Chancellor will no longer get away with his devious behaviour. At the same time, we are appalled by the toadying of Lewis Crowden, the chairman of the magistrates’ bench which jailed Miss Hardy, who had no words of sympathy for pensioners caught in the council tax trap but who fatuously told his victim, ‘You may think you are a martyr but you are not.’ In a literal sense, Miss Hardy, who happily survived her brief imprisonment, is not a martyr. But in demanding fairness for a group of citizens who have been exploited by the Exchequer, she follows an honourable tradition of protest. The iniquity of her imprisonment is something Gordon Brown will ignore at his peril.
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