When I was a child, we lived in a two-up, two-down terraced slum in Walthamstow, East London with bombsites at the back. My father made me a doll’s house by dividing a box into four for the rooms. One year when we hadn’t any coal, I watched my doll’s house, disassembled, burning in the living room grate. I couldn’t grumble. I had asthma and for the first couple of years of my life there was no NHS. Just being alive was a bloody miracle. I rather admired the glittering ice patterns on the inside of my bedroom window.
I was cold then, and I am cold now. I had hoped things might improve in the 21st century. My £200 winter fuel payment was eaten up in just over a month by my energy company. I must have been too warm. Now I can only afford to have one radiator on at 18.5 degrees, so my clothes and books have been going mouldy. A marvellous local Somerset Council charity, Surviving Winter, helped me out and provided a dehumidifier, and I have a cold shower every morning now too to toughen myself up.
Perhaps the poor have become an embarrassment
I’ve been a writer all my life, with twenty published books. There’s generally not much money in the arts and we are surely meant to starve in our garrets. The Royal Literary Fund has been magnificently supportive as they think well of my oeuvre and make me a grant once a year from the estates of great writers. So I am lucky. But other pensioners are not.
What does it cost to live these days? Average weekly earnings in Britain are an estimated £705, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The state pension is £221.20 a week with no realistic means of extra income other than taking in washing. Supermarket bargains come in family packs. I fully appreciate there are more important priorities for a socialist government than keeping poor pensioners alive. After all, a lot of us will be dead four years from now and of no electoral value. I receive £137.14 state pension and £81.01 pension credits a week. That must be a drain on the exchequer. No wonder they are thinking of abolishing the triple lock and letting the devil take the hindmost of us.
There are 1.36 million pensioner households in receipt of pension credits like myself, and there are an estimated 760,000 pensioner households eligible but not receiving them. Older people were brought up to be proud and independent. Many would rather die than claim benefits or ask their families for help when they themselves are struggling to raise their children. Age UK warned last year that high numbers of pensioners living below or just above the poverty line – 82 per cent or four in every five – would lose their winter fuel payment as a result of the government’s policy change.
Sure enough, the charity now estimates that 2.5 million of the poorest pensioners no longer receive help to keep warm, vulnerable as they are to hypothermia. Before Starmer stopped their winter fuel payment, better-off pensioners used to donate to charities for the poorer ones. Astonishingly, some still do.
But the cold old are not a cause célèbre. I’ve had books published on various subjects, one of them being dogs. It’s common now, when one meets a dog owner on the street, to discover that their rescue mutt came from Rumania or Turkey, while literally thousands of unwanted British dogs are put to sleep because nobody wants them, and all the small shelters are closing, starved of funds. It seems our own waifs and strays are not sufficiently exotic for fashionable taste, a bit like foreign aid being more resonant with charitable minds than the poor boring old British.
Another of my books was the official biography of the great Marje Proops, advice columnist to the Daily Mirror with 2 million readers’ letters in the archives showing how she helped desperately unhappy people. Marje was a campaigning socialist in the days when that word meant something. She occasionally helped to change the law and got very angry indeed about the casualties of poverty. One double-page feature that damn near broke my heart was about an elderly lady who was found dead in her own home apparently having eaten cardboard to try to stay alive.
Because they were working class, my parents and all their friends voted Labour. They expected their MPs to speak for them as they were not well-educated and had no other voice. They and their own parents avoided unemployment like the plague. They supported the Rhondda miners when they fought pitched battles with Churchill’s police over the 2s 3d a ton they had to produce, and they lived through two world wars and the Blitz, dodging doodlebugs to get to work, ‘toughing it out’. None of them would have recognised the political party that goes by the name of Labour now.
Nor would my pensioner friends. There’s octogenarian Peter in Sussex, who has been an armourer and Roman technical adviser on the film Gladiator, who peers in the chiller cabinet looking for those £2.50 meal deals. There’s 90-year-old widow June in Suffolk, who spent most of her life working in animal welfare, withdrawing £15 from the ATM ‘because you have to be so careful’. There’s writer Christopher who lives in London and can’t afford to go out, and brilliant Sean, who produced a novel that had two film options on it which came to nothing, who relies on lifts as he can’t afford to run a car. They’ve all worked hard but without the necessary business acumen to capitalise on their industry or their talent. They surely deserve better.
Perhaps the poor have become an embarrassment, and cold pensioners are therefore viewed with disdain. The debate about deserving and undeserving poor has raged since the 1300s. The Victorians, whose ideas seem to be enjoying a resurgence, thought the latter. Under the 1834 Poor Law, 150 workhouses were established in large towns and cities around England – there’s one in my village of Williton that has been converted into flats – where paupers were separated from their children, punished for not finding work and disciplined with starvation rations and sometimes thumbscrews. The Victorian Tory radical Richard Oastler called them ‘prisons for the poor’.
William Blake railed about child chimney sweeps and tiny textile workers crawling under the looms, and Charles Dickens, who worked in a boot-blacking factory at the age of 12, drew down the imaginations of the selfish rich into his novels. Scrooge is told by the Ghost of Christmas Present, showing him two desperate kids hiding under his coat, ‘This boy is ignorance, this girl is want. Beware them both, but most, beware this boy.’ He might have added, ‘And look out for the riots.’
I have no idea what this Labour government thinks it’s doing. They certainly do not represent the downtrodden, or the white working classes of this country. To me, Starmer and his leftist elite seem more like ideologues who revere ideas above people, or the National Socialists we fought in the last war. And we all know how merciful they were.
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