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Fair pensions for all - support the November 30 strike

Sarah Evans Andover
22nd November 2011 at 22:51
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In January it will be 103 years since Pensions Day in 1909, when the first general old age pension was introduced by the old Liberal Party under Lloyd George.

At the time they were denounced as socialists by the Tories for enacting such a terrible policy – a policy which had taken the working class 24 years to win, from the campaign’s inception in Southwark in 1885.

There were huge numbers living in poverty in 1909, so the pension was a major step forward, but its limitations reflected the Victorian attitude that some poor people were more deserving than others – an attitude that is resurfacing today under the current government.

In 1909 the pension was available only to people over 70 who could prove that they were of good character, had never been to prison, and were not in a mental health institution or a workhouse.

These lucky few were deemed to deserve a paltry sum of between one and five shillings – a fraction of the average unskilled labourer’s wage of 25 shillings.

It was set deliberately at a low level, supposedly to encourage people to make their own pension provision.

The similarities with today’s Tories are striking: the creation of division through the myth of the undeserving and deserving poor, turning working people on each other rather than the policy makers, who carried on looking after the interests of the monied few.

The Labour Party had not be around long in 1909 – it had been set up because trade unionists were fed up with being let down by the Liberals – but Labour’s 29 MPs welcomed the pension.

To their credit, they also criticised the paltry amount and the fact that it was means tested.

It was only 35 years later, after the Second World War, that Labour established the Welfare State, with the aim of providing decent basic living standards from the cradle to the grave.

It was an approach that saw the country’s economy and the wellbeing of its people as completely intertwined, and that the fairest way was for everyone to contribute to the pot so that basic needs of health, housing, education could be met.

But over the past 30 years we have seen successive governments chip away at that principle, and the very concept of a society that responds to need rather greed.

A century on, the 21st century Tories and their LibDem allies have rebranded the idea of the deserving and undeserving poor, and nearly every day we see stories in the right-wing press villifing single mums, the disabled, the feckless, the jobless.

They have gone to town on ‘greedy’ public-sector workers and their ‘gold-plated pensions’ who have such a ‘better lot’ than people in the private sector.

Of course the reality is that both private- and public-sector workers, as well as the jobless, the disabled, pensioners and children, are all suffering from the effects of a society that for more than three decades has worshipped greed at the expense of compassion and mutual help.

We all need a decent pension to retire in dignity, but the reality is that very few people outside the ‘one per cent’ in the city of London get a gold-plated pension – certainly not public servants for whom the average pension is £5,600.

We all too need a decent wage, a roof over our heads, healthcare, heating, education and food, but government policies that increasingly deny these things to working people and concentrate wealth in the hands of the one per cent sow the seeds of division.

The government’s attack on public-sector pensions is based on myths.

The government’s own Hutton report rejected the idea that public-sector pensions are gold-plated, while the National Audit Office affirmed that the present arrangements are not only affordable, but will in fact cost the country less as years go by.

The government is fond of peddling the divisive argument that it is time for the public sector to take the same medicine that private-sector workers have already endured.

It was of course the Tories’ friends in the banks and city who enjoyed the perks of lengthy ‘pensions holidays’ when private-sector pension funds were deemed to be rolling in it.

But having starved those funds – and in some cases (like Robert Maxwell) literally robbed from them – there was of course no question of making up the contributions that had been withheld when those funds hit trouble.

And it was the last Tory government that started the long process of killing off the safe state earnings-related pension – SERPS – by conning people to place their faith in the casino of private markets instead.

That is why only one in three private-sector workers now has even an inferior occupational pension scheme.

It is nothing to do with sharing the pain of paying off the deficit, it is about daylight robbery by the very bankers and corporate bosses whose unregulated greed got us into the mess we are now in.

Those without occupational schemes are also now faced with the massive squeeze on their incomes imposed by the present government in order to provide welfare to the bankers, leaving them with less, if any, money to invest in private schemes.

The uptake of private pension schemes is now at its lowest since the 1950s, and many of us are paying in far too little to provide a dignified and secure retirement.

And the proportion of Britain’s overall product, the GDP, paid in wages has been steadily falling since the Tories were last in power, thanks to laws imposed by Thatcher and, to its shame, maintained by Labour, that stop trade unions fighting effectively to defend pay and conditions.

The reality of the 2008 crash and the recession gripping the economy has shown the folly of leaving pensions to the markets – effectively gambling our retirement nest-egg on little more than a roulette wheel.

For those whose only cushion is the state pension, they are forced to live on between £61 and £102 per week – one of the lowest in Europe and below the official poverty line.

So it’s no wonder that every winter around 30,000 pensioners die of cold-related illness – vulnerable people forced to make the choice between putting food on the table and heating their homes.

And that is a problem faced increasingly by others too, the jobless, the disabled, people with serious or terminal illnesses, families with young children and increasingly people in work, but whose pay simply doesn’t stretch that far.

Last year demand for food banks grew by 50 per cent over the previous year.
And here in supposedly affluent Hampshire, Andover was the third-busiest food bank of those run by the Trussell Trust, and just up the road Salisbury came second.

In 2010 the Trussell Trust distributed nearly 3,000 food parcels in Andover.

And just as our own MP, George Young, once described the homeless as the people you stepped over on the way home from the opera, so Salisbury MP John Glen told Channel 4 News that the poor were spending their money on the wrong things if they needed help from a food bank.

Back in 1909 between 25 and 35 per cent were living in poverty in London’s East End and we thought we had seen an end to that.

But today we have upwards of 22 per cent living poverty, and it is getting worse.
Working people are being made to pay for a global crisis with the biggest attack on our living standards, public services and welfare state that we have ever seen.

Now is not the time to allow them to divide private-sector from public-sector workers, now is the time for us to work together and to reject any notion that some are more deserving than others – although we could instead focus on the underserving rich.

Let us be clear.

The government’s pensions reform is not about making public-sector pensions affordable.

It is a straightforward cash-grab that will see wealth taken from public-sector workers to help pay the bail-out and bonuses of the bankers.

It is about paying for the biggest-ever act of corporate welfare ever seen in this country.

Next Wednesday millions of workers, including here in Andover, will be taking a stand against those who would rob from the less well-off to give to the rich, and we should applaud them and stand with them on the picket lines.

For anyone who doubts this – think of your children and your grandchildren and ask yourself if you want them trying to eke out an existence having to choose between putting food on the table or heating their home.

We must expose the lies behind the attack on pensions.

Most public-sector pensions are less than £5,600 per year, only £3000 for local government workers.

For part-time workers, the majority of the women, it is even worse.

In a YouGov poll 44 per cent of people who were asked, thought a public-sector pension should be more than £15,000.00, nearly three times what it is.

And 49 per cent believed the average public sector pension was more than £10,000 – the average answer was £17,000.

£5,600 per year is £107.00 per week. The state pension is only £102.00 per week and we’ve already identified that that is below the poverty line.

This shows just how the government’s myth-making, lapped up by the right-wing press, has had a major effect, and we must stop the government exploiting its own myths to divide us.

But even if public-sector pensions did average £17,000.00 per year, there is still no case for cutting them.

The battle should be to raise everyone’s pensions to that level and beyond, and not to join a race to the bottom.

The reality remains that public-sector pensions as they are are affordable, and if anything there is a case for raising them.

Just as destroying jobs is making the crisis worse by turning taxpayers into benefit claimants, so lowering pensions will reduce the amount of money that people have to spend in the economy.

It is part of a downward spiral.

The government’s line that cuts in services, jobs, benefits and pensions is part of the big lie.

The government says that it wants to raise an extra £3 billion in public-sector pension contributions.

But every year £120 billion of tax owed by wealthy individuals and big business goes uncollected.

Vodafone alone has just avoided an £8 billion tax bill with a nod and a wink to Revenue and Customs.

Britain’s debt in 1945 was twice what it is now as a proportion of gross domestic product, yet the 1945 Labour government set up the health service, built hundreds of thousands of council homes.

The national debt is a smokescreen for a government that is ideologically opposed to the provision of public services.

The total personal wealth in the UK is £9,000 billion, a sum that dwarfs the national debt, and more than half of it is held by the richest ten per cent. (read more about a wealth tax).

It may sound like a crazy idea, but a YouGov poll from June 2010 suggested that three-quarters of the population would favour a one-off tax on the wealthiest six million people in Britain.

The government has no case for attacking public-sector pensions, just as it has no case for destroying jobs and services and taking benefits from the sick and disabled.

I applaud the stand being taken by the 28 unions whose members will be on strike next Wednesday.

As a Labour Party member I believe that my party’s leadership should stand shoulder to shoulder with us, with trade unionists - with the 99 per cent - on November 30.

I will be out there on picket lines in and around Andover and I hope that November 30 will go down in history as the day that the government’s attempt to rob pensioners to subsidise bankers’ bonuses was nailed.

Links to articles and info can be found on my blog: http://sarahevanslabour.blogspot.com/2011/11/fair-pensions-for-all-support-november.html

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