If nothing else, the government is providing us with a masterclass in how to lose control of public spending. A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there, as Ronald Reagan once said, and soon it begins to add up to some serious money. Work and pensions secretary Pat McFadden has announced that he intends to take another look at one of the few good decisions Labour has taken since it came to office last year: to refuse compensation to nearly three million ‘Waspi’ women who have bleated that they weren’t given sufficient warning that their pension age was to be increased from 60 to 65, ruining their delicately-laid retirement plans.
When the decision was made last year, the government argued that handing out £10.5 billion to boomer women – many of whom are well-off anyway – would not be a fair and proportionate use of public money. Quite right. The Waspi case never was anything other than scurrilous and opportunistic. We are being led to believe that here was a generation of women who had carefully organised every detail of their retirement plans – short of bothering to look up at what age they would become eligible for the state pension. This was a change which led the news bulletins on the day it was announced in 1995, many years before it was due to take effect. The very acronym ‘Waspi’ speaks of unreasonableness – it stands for ‘women against state pension inequality’. Raising the state pension age for women was of course aimed at doing just that – doing away with the perk which allowed women to retire five years earlier than men.
The Waspi case never was anything other than scurrilous and opportunistic
McFadden now says a new document has come to light which means that the government must look at the decision afresh. He insists that it doesn’t mean the government is planning to cave in, but it isn’t hard to see what is going on here. Whenever the government proposes to make any kind of spending cut, or to deny a claim for a spending rise, Labour backbenchers rise up in anger and insist that everything is affordable, we just need a wealth tax. With Starmer’s popularity plummeting to new depths, he is trying to buy his way of trouble with taxpayers’ money.
If Starmer gives in to Waspi women, there really will be no bottom to the pool of claims from Labour’s client groups. They will see how the government has caved in over the winter fuel payment, personal independence payments, and work out that they can get whatever they demand – and Rachel Reeves will try to pay for it by clobbering the rich (and not so rich, once she has bled the genuinely wealthy dry). The next concession to backbenchers, it seems, will be over the child benefit cap.
Maybe this is how we have to live in Starmer’s Britain: accept that we will be taxed punitively – but dream up ways in which we, too, might get our noses in the public trough. Come to think of it, I don’t remember ever being sent a letter warning me that my state retirement age is to rise from 65 to 67. Nor have I received a letter telling me that Reeves is about to increase my income tax – which will upset my carefully-laid spending plans for the coming year.
If the government gives way on Waspi women, it will create the precedent that it can’t make any change to fiscal policy without first writing us all a letter. I think we can all make some money from this, but especially taxpayers who will be affected by changes in the Budget.
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