In this godforsaken era of feigned victimhood, is there any group less worthy of our sympathy than the Waspi women? Having been, rightly, denied compensation by the government in December, they are now threatening legal action unless they are given a payout. Will their entitlement never end?
It’s hard to know where to start with this dreadful campaign. Their name alone should be considered a breach of the trade descriptions act. ‘Women Against State Pension Inequality’ suggests they’re campaigning against some great disparity. Except they’re not. They’re just angry that the inequality from which they historically benefited has come to end. ‘Women Against State Pension Equality’ would be a more appropriate name for the group.
The decision taken in 1995 to equalise the state pension age for men and women was self-evidently the right one. Why should a man have to wait five years longer to draw his pension than a woman? If anything, given women benefit from a longer life expectancy, you could argue that men should have a lower pension age than women. Not that I’m expecting the Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall to use that particular line of argument any time soon.
Thirty years ago, the Major government decided that instead of fixing this historic injustice overnight, they would play it safe and go slow. The state pension age for women was gradually increased over the decades until, in 2018, equality was finally achieved. And that should be the end of the story. Except somewhere along the line, no doubt goaded on by avaricious attorneys, the Waspi women felt they had been failed by the state. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In December, the Plaid Cymru leader at Westminster, Liz Saville-Roberts, compared Waspi women to victims of the infected blood and Post Office scandals. It’s hard to imagine a more grotesquely inappropriate analogy. The former were genuine miscarriages of justice in which innocent lives were lost or destroyed. The Waspi women, by contrast, claim the state failed them because the letters notifying them of the change to the state pension age could have been sent a bit earlier. And perhaps a bit more often. It is laughable.
Not that this stops the Waspi women from cladding themselves in the colours of the suffragette movement. Seeing them march on Whitehall, draped in purple and green, you almost has to marvel at the mental gymnastics on display. It would be laughable if it weren’t so galling. This is the richest generation in human history and still they want more.
But what is most jarring about their latest legal threat is the timing. In case you haven’t noticed, the coffers are running a bit dry at the moment. Westminster may have finally woken up to the need to spend tens of billions more on defence, but with non-existent growth and a national debt as big as our economy, finding the funds to pay for it will require new sacrifices. What we really don’t need is any otherwise avoidable costs being added to the government’s balance sheet. And yet, if the Waspi women were to win their case, the government would have to stump up an extra £10.5 billion.
The time has come to call the Waspi women what they are: greedy. They have not been wronged. Their lives have not been destroyed. They should have been told to get over it long ago.
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