The answer’s simple, but will our pensioners work it out?
With both Labour and the Tories refusing to guarantee the continuation of the triple-lock, there is no reason for the worst-paid pensioners in Europe – ours, here in the UK – to give either party their vote.
Jeremy Hunt refuses to guarantee the pensions triple lock will be in next Tory manifesto.
The same as Labour.
UK present/future retirees condemned to one of the lowest state pensions in Europe.
Find another party to support! Your life depends on it.
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The short answer is he isn’t – if you can believe what Rishi Sunak said during Prime Minister’s Questions.
Asked if he was committed to the pension’s triple-lock, that commits the government to increasing pensions each year by the highest of 2.5 per cent, inflation, or average wages, Sunak said:
“This is the Government who introduced and remain committed to the triple lock.”
That means pensions should rise by 8.5 per cent – the average annual wage increase recorded in the summer months.
But Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride had previously refused to commit to this, and it is rumoured that he wants to strip out the effect of one-off bonuses paid to public sector workers, to bring the increase down to 7.8 per cent.
It’s an argument reminiscent of that used back in September 2021, when a huge fall in earnings caused by the Covid pandemic was followed by a similarly whopping rise when everybody went back to work and their pay packets re-balanced.
The real-terms change in that case was negligible, but the rule does not take account of falls in income – only of increases.
The suspension of the triple-lock in that year was halted in the House of Lords, when Baron Prem Sikka demonstrated that it would result in a loss of more than £30 billion to pensioners by 2027:
DAYLIGHT ROBBERY: UK govt admits that suspension of the triple-lock will rob retirees of £5.4bn of pensions in 2022/23, £5,78bn in 2023/24, £6.1bn in 2024/25, £6.5bn in 2025/26 and £6.7bn in 2026/27, totalling £30.5bn over 5yrs (see page 136 of the link).https://t.co/yoDIiMbSsd
Suspending the triple-lock would also have broken a Tory manifesto promise – as it will if Sunak does it this year.
In fact, This Writer was not particularly impressed with any of the arguments about pensions back in 2021 because I thought a simple cost-of-living increase would have been more in spirit with the intention of the triple-lock.
No – my argument with what the Tories were doing was more holistic than that; I looked at the wider issue of how much the UK pays in pensions, and found that the people were being short-changed. Here’s what I said then:
The point is that the UK state pension is one of the worst pension deals in the whole world.
On retirement, our pensioners will receive, on average, 29 per cent of their former earnings. This compares with an increase of 0.6 per cent in the Netherlands, more than 90 per cent of former earnings in Portugal, Italy and Austria, and an OECD (Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development) nations’ average of nearly 63 per cent.
In fact, the UK’s pensions deal comes in at slightly worse than that provided in… Mexico.
This was a chance to level up the UK pension with some of our closest neighbours – but the Tories didn’t want to. That’s why people should be angry.
Some of the figures may have changed since then – but I doubt the UK’s position relative to other countries has.
Mine certainly hasn’t. How about yours?
Ultimately, of course, this is just part of Sunak’s quest to find which sector of society he can most comfortably penalise in order to give a big tax break to rich and influential people, so they will then persuade or coerce enough of the wider electorate to vote in another Tory government at the next election.
I still reckon that, rather than attacking pensioners or people on Universal Credit (which will include employees), the axe will fall on sick and disabled people, because they are least able to defend themselves. As usual.
I did a bit of digging (not very much!) and it turns out that Mr Burgon isn’t wrong:
Workers are £11,000 worse off per year due to 15 years of wage stagnation, according to the Resolution Foundation.
In new figures shared with BBC Panorama, the think tank calculated that, had wages continued to grow at the pace seen before the 2008 financial crash, the average worker would make £11,000 more per year than they do now, taking rising prices into account.
Torsten Bell, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, told the BBC the wage stagnation of the past 15 years is “almost completely unprecedented”.
Unprecedented it may be, but you can bet it was entirely planned by the Tories who slithered into government in 2010.
“This is definitely not what normal looks like. This is what failure looks like.”
Not as far as those Tories were concerned. For them, it was success. They funnelled the cash away from the majority of UK citizens, away from the Treasury, and into the hands and offshore bank accounts of the tiniest minority of the super-rich.
The UK’s top ten richest people are wealthier than the group has ever been, according to The Sunday Times, who recently released their annual Rich List. Their data finds that the cumulative wealth of the top ten billionaires in the UK has grown from £47.77 billion in 2009 to £182 billion in 2022 – an increase of 281 percent.
As this chart shows, following the 2008 crash, the UK’s billionaires have seen a steady, and fairly steep, incline in their wealth. The upward trend continued despite the pandemic, which saw the UK’s economy shrink by 20.4 percent in the second quarter of 2020, as most industries suffered, and 30.5 million people in Europe were expected to be pushed into poverty. This is a stark contrast to the UK’s 250 ultra wealthy, who saw their collective wealth surge to a record high of £653 billion in 2022.
And Jeremy Hunt’s Budget predicted slower growth than we expected after the disastrous Liz Truss was ousted from Downing Street last year.
And the Tories are starting to bounce back in the opinion polls.
Who are the people going back to them? Are they masochists?
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The triple lock ensuring that pensions rise by the highest of 2.5 per cent, average earnings, or inflation is in danger of being dropped by Rishi Sunak’s new Tory government.
It seems the new prime minister, whose personal wealth is greater than that of the King, is not keen to allow pensioners’ payments to rise in line with the cost of living; inflation currently stands at a 40-year high of 10.1 per cent, due to the failures of previous Tory administrations.
His press secretary has merely claimed that Sunak has a record of being “compassionate for the most vulnerable”. This Writer is not convinced that such a claim holds water.
It seems clear that the pensions triple lock – which was a Tory idea, let’s not forget – was never intended to allow payment increases of the kind being demanded now.
It was a lie intended to dupe senior citizens into thinking the Tories support them and therefore into voting Conservative at elections.
It was dropped during the Covid-19 crisis because wages, having fallen, then rose by eight per cent and Sunak refused to pay. That was a special case, though, because the triple lock did not take account of falls in wages; the rise in fact only returned wages to where they were before.
This is not a special case. The cost of living has increased enormously and richer-than-the-King Sunak is indicating that he wants pensioners to be unable to afford to pay their bills any more.
Oh – and Sunak won’t commit to raising state benefits in line with prices, either.
The decisions on these issues will come on November 17, in Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s winter Budget that is replacing a statement that was due on Monday. Hunt has been given more than two weeks’ grace to find a way to make the situation work for pensioners and those on benefits.
Do you honestly think he’ll bother?
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Pensions: it seems this time the Tories have been prevented from stabbing our senior citizens in the back.
This is excellent news – and a welcome surprise after Labour Baron Prem Sikka signalled that the Lords had failed to support his amendment to save the triple lock.
It seems they then supported a cross-party amendment to keep the pensions triple lock in place.
Peers by 280 votes to 178 backed a cross-party motion to keep retirement payouts linked to earnings – a large majority of 102.
Under the amendment the so-called “triple lock” would stay in place but adjustments would be allowed to be made for the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The defeat means the government will either have to accept the amendment, or send its original plan back to the Lords again and risk prolonging the political row.
The Tories are now whining that they have only suspended the triple lock for a single year – but Baron Sikka demonstrated yesterday that this would result in a loss of more than £30 billion to pensioners by 2027:
DAYLIGHT ROBBERY: UK govt admits that suspension of the triple-lock will rob retirees of £5.4bn of pensions in 2022/23, £5,78bn in 2023/24, £6.1bn in 2024/25, £6.5bn in 2025/26 and £6.7bn in 2026/27, totalling £30.5bn over 5yrs (see page 136 of the link).https://t.co/yoDIiMbSsd
Under the triple lock, the state pension rises every year by the general rate of increase in earnings, the rate of inflation, or 2.5 per cent – whichever is the highest.
Because earnings fell dramatically during the first part of the pandemic and then rebounded quickly, an unmodified version of the pension triple lock would see a sharp rise in the state pension of around 8 per cent. The government wants to pass legislation that would stop this from happening automatically, and says it will reinstate the policy after the pandemic.
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He said he didn’t become a Conservative – I think he means a Tory MP – to make his constituents colder and poorer.
But he should know perfectly well that being a Conservative MP means doing both of those things.
Consider the decision to end the triple lock on pensions for a year because the Covid-19-related fall and rise in earnings had created an anomalously large percentage wage increase that had not been anticipated when the idea had been enshrined in law.
That single change will mean a massive fall in pensioners’ incomes, that has already been mapped out as far as five years into the future:
DAYLIGHT ROBBERY: UK govt admits that suspension of the triple-lock will rob retirees of £5.4bn of pensions in 2022/23, £5,78bn in 2023/24, £6.1bn in 2024/25, £6.5bn in 2025/26 and £6.7bn in 2026/27, totalling £30.5bn over 5yrs (see page 136 of the link).https://t.co/yoDIiMbSsd
An attempt by Baron Sikka to save the triple lock, during a debate in the House of Lords, was foiled when other peers shouted over his call for a vote:
Lords to debate triple-lock soon. A number of votes possible. I ask for full triple-lock. Govt opposing, Labour abstaining. Chances of successful outcome are miniscule. But I will push on. Put down markers, give visibility to injustice, poverty and neglect of retirees.
So we see that by voting to abandon the pensions triple lock (as you can see by checking Hansard here), Mackinlay did indeed – deliberately and knowingly – make his constituents poorer.
Remember that, even though pensions are still being uprated, inflation is higher than it has been in many years; the cost of things like heating will outstrip pensioners’ ability to pay for them.
And that brings me to Mackinlay’s claim about making his constituents colder. If they can’t afford to heat their homes then they will be colder. It’s as simple as that.
And his government’s refusal to accept Insulate Britain’s call for social housing to be properly insulated (rather than left to be leaky, as they are now) mean any heat generated in these dwellings dissipates into the atmosphere, increasing climate change.
And that brings us back to Mackinlay’s argument – that he doesn’t think the investment in fighting climate change is worthwhile.
Either he has not realised that ensuring that people are warm, by spending on insulation, would help to fight climate change – or he’s disingenuously trying to convince you of that.
That’s just a simple chain of logic involving two sets of people. Feel free to work out ways the Tories are impoverishing and freezing other sections of society.
And if you ever meet Craig Mackinlay, feel free to point out the faults in his logic.
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All in it together: with Keir Starmer backing him up and blocking opposition, Boris Johnson can do whatever he likes. And are they both lining their pockets at our expense?
Boris Johnson was only able to force Theresa May out of Downing Street and become prime minister himself because Keir Starmer sabotaged Brexit talks, a biography of the Labour leader claims.
Lord (Michael) Ashcroft’s book Red Knight: The Unauthorised Biography of Keir Starmer alleges that Starmer blocked a deal with Theresa May’s government that could have resulted in a ‘soft’ Brexit.
We should be grateful to the blog Colonel Despard’s Radical Comment for teasing out the important details:
Ashcroft’s book notes that May had invited Jeremy Corbyn to take part in cross-party talks in an attempt to agree a unified approach to Brexit. Starmer led the Labour delegation. According to an extract published in the Daily Mail, “The meetings opened with some optimism. The Government team quickly discerned, however, that some of those in the Labour camp were more willing to compromise than others. While those in Corbyn’s close team ‘were sending out signals that they wanted a deal’, Starmer was insistent that an agreement had to include a second referendum.”
While on the surface conducting himself professionally, behind the scenes it appeared that Starmer himself was giving negative briefings to the media that undermined the talks. May’s former director of communications, Sir Robbie Gibb, believes that Starmer was responsible for leaks that contradicted the joint reports agreed with Seumas Milne, Gibb’s Labour counterpart.
Gibb told Ashcroft: “there were briefings to the BBC’s Today programme saying that the cross-party talks are going nowhere. I’d get a call from the BBC saying, ‘I believe the talks are on the verge of collapse.’ ‘Well, who have you spoken to?’, I’d say. ‘Can’t say. It’s official sources’. He is convinced the negative briefings came from Starmer or his team, and that the mixed messages highlighted conflicting attitudes within the Labour delegation.”
According to Labour sources quoted by Ashcroft, Starmer was the most deal-resistant of the Labour negotiators, and worked to undermine those in Corbyn’s team who were in favour of a deal.
The book further alleges that Starmer did this in order to get support from the People’s Vote campaign that would translate into votes for him in a Labour leadership election.
The failure of the talks also led to May’s resignation and a Conservative leadership election that ended with Boris Johnson’s ascension to the leadership – and the role of UK prime minister – because of Keir Starmer’s interference.
But did Starmer’s treachery go further than that? Was he in fact supporting hard-Brexit Tories all along?
It has been argued that the only reason Labour’s Brexit policy at the 2019 general election was confused, leading to the party’s historically major loss was… Keir Starmer.
He had made a major intervention at the party’s 2018 conference responding to clear anti-Brexit sentiment among delegates by unilaterally introducing the idea that there would be a Remain option in a second referendum.
According to the blog article, this led to a policy change that would
accentuate the divisions between remain supporters and MPs from leave-voting Labour constituencies in the north who warned at the time that the policy would lose the party votes in a new election – which is in fact what happened.
So it seems Keir Starmer deliberately engineered Labour’s 2019 election loss.
This evidence strongly suggests not only that Starmer had worked to undermine Labour’s policy in order to further his own career, but also that he deliberately supported Boris Johnson’s – and continues to do so, to this day.
Starmer dropped his support for remaining in the European Union like a hot potato as soon as he was elected Labour leader.
The disasters caused by Brexit, that have led to the collapse of the UK’s transport infrastructure and shortages of products that we previously took for granted, have created golden opportunities for a Remain-supporting Starmer to criticise the Tory Brexit.
But he has been silent.
Not only that, but he has also supported Johnson on other matters.
The Tory response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been a national tragedy, with hundreds of thousands of deaths* and millions of people likely to suffer the debilitating effects of Long Covid.
But Starmer has been silent. Indeed, he has only raised his voice to support government policies like the catastrophic decision to reopen schools last year, allowing the virus to access a superhighway into homes across the UK that created the winter surge at the end of 2020 and beginning of this year.
That is just one prominent example. You can probably pick out your own favourites from any number of Tory policies that Starmer has either overtly or tacitly supported, or failed to oppose in any meaningful way.
Now he has whipped Labour MPs to abstain on the scrapping of the triple-lock on pensions that, until now, protected what little value the UK state pension provided to our senior citizens.
The loss of the increase that would have been provided this year will now become structural, meaning future pensioners will be disadvantaged in perpetuity by this betrayal.
You may find it hard to accept.
But there is a clear argument that Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson are “all in it together”, as the former Tory slogan has it – and in it for themselves.
With Johnson as prime minister and Starmer blocking any possibility of strong opposition, they can line their pockets while the rest of us suffer.
*Remember, the official figures only record deaths within 28 days of a diagnosis, in order to reduce public feeling against the government’s failed policies.
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This Site predicted the suspension of the pensions triple lock, so it’s no surprise here.
The problem with the commitment to increase pensions every year by the highest of pensions, earnings or 2.5 per cent is that it did not anticipate a huge fall in earnings like that caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, followed by a similarly whopping rise when everybody went back to work and pay packets re-balanced.
It meant the highest of the three benchmarks – this year – is a massive eight per cent increase. And the Tories don’t want to pay it.
Back in July, I suggested the Tories were making a big fuss about nothing because they could impose a stop-gap increase that reflects the increase in the cost of living (which is what the triple lock is supposed to do).
It turns out that the Tories are doing something similar. Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey said that – for this year only – pensions would rise by inflation or 2.5 per cent, whichever is higher. The earnings increase will be restored to the calculation next year.
The decision has caused bitter resentment in some quarters, because people are upset that the Tories have broken a manifesto promise.
But this misses the point completely.
The point is that the UK state pension is one of the worst pension deals in the whole world.
On retirement, our pensioners will receive, on average, 29 per cent of their former earnings. This compares with an increase of 0.6 per cent in the Netherlands, more than 90 per cent of former earnings in Portugal, Italy and Austria, and an OECD (Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development) nations’ average of nearly 63 per cent.
In fact, the UK’s pensions deal comes in at slightly worse than that provided in… Mexico.
This was a chance to level up the UK pension with some of our closest neighbours – but the Tories didn’t want to. That’s why people should be angry.
According to this she said "Pensioners must not benefit from a statistical anomaly" with a state pension lower than Mexico this slob makes such an announcement. pic.twitter.com/Qba1XiMls7
Of course, with the national insurance increase that the Tories say will pay for social care (eventually), pensioners will be worse off than ever – because pensioners who are still earning an income will pay towards it.
And there’s another aspect to this.
It is the rivalry between the old and the young over state benefits, the perception that pensioners get more than their fair share, and that they should lose some in order to correct a perceived imbalance.
We can and should spend more on social security for young and old people alike.
To believe that a Conservative government would invest what it saves by removing the triple lock on today’s young people requires some magical thinking.
In practice, by reducing the state pension accrual rate (the entitlements we build up in return for paying national insurance), scrapping the triple lock would effectively amount to a significant tax hike on young people.
That’s because the tax they pay now would entitle them to a lower income in retirement than previously anticipated.
So it is ridiculous to suggest that we need to cut pension increases in order to help the young. It simply won’t happen.
Let’s face it – it simply hasn’t happened.
The (alleged) social care-related increase to National Insurance will affect young people and pensioners alike.
Because that’s what Tories are like.
They don’t take away from one group that needs help, in order to give to another.
They take from both, in order to give to themselves – as you can see with Boris Johnson’s National Insurance hike.
My only question is, do we believe them when they say they’re going to bring the triple lock back?
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The Conservatives abolished targets for reducing child poverty in 2015.
The cumulative impact of current Conservative government changes to state benefits means child poverty will double, in comparison with the current level.
It is currently understood that 4.1 million children are in poverty. That’s 30 per cent of all children.
So Tory cuts will put 60 per cent of children in poverty, if the number of children in the UK remains steady; 8.2 million youngsters.
That’s shameful enough; 18 children in every classroom of 30 will be in poverty thanks to Tory policies in very short order.
But that’s not the worst of it.
You need to understand that child poverty has already increased by nearly three-fifths under the cuts the Tories have already imposed.
In 2009-10, there were only 2.6 million children in poverty. And that was considered too many by the Labour government of the day.
So the latest research shows child poverty is expected to have more-than-tripled since 2010, by the time the Conservative cuts really bite.
This means the childhood of 60 per cent of people will be blighted by the Conservatives.
Half of them – nine children in every classroom of 30 – will not be able to go on holiday for even one week in the year.
By the time they take their GCSEs, there will be a 27 per cent achievement gap between pupils on free school meals and their colleagues with wealthier parents.
The effects continue through later life. Men in the most deprived areas of England die an average of 9.2 years earlier than those in the least deprived areas – and spend 14 per cent less of their lives in good health. The statistics for women are similar.
And the impoverishment of your children doesn’t even save the state any money.
Governments forgo prospective revenues and commit themselves to providing services in the future if they fail to address child poverty.
The cost of child poverty on the UK government at the moment is estimated to be at least £29 billion per year.
Those are the findings of the Child Poverty Action Group.
The meaning is clear:
Child poverty harms all of us. Perhaps that’s why the Tories like inflicting it on young people.
Changes to social security benefits are devastating family incomes and will double the number of UK children living in poverty, according to a damning new report published today.
Research by Policy in Practice, on behalf of the Children’s Commissioner for England, found that policies like Universal Credit, the Two-Child Limit, and Benefit Cap affect 48% of households and will leave them worse off by £3,441 per year.
Overall, the cumulative impact of all welfare reforms “is considerably greater than the impact of each reform in isolation”, the report says.
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Triple-dip breakfast: Will we all be dining on the sour cereal of recession again, when GDP figures are published on Thursday morning?
Thursday will be another ‘crunch’ day for our part-time Chancellor of the Exchequer – he’s having quite a lot of those lately, isn’t he?
Only last week, the academic justification for his austerity policy was disproven by an American student (oh, the shame!), and then his former allies at the International Monetary Fund distanced themselves from him (oh, the betrayal!) saying he should calm down a bit.
That’s the best advice this columnist has ever heard the IMF provide; if not for his own health, then for the nation’s.
Thursday, though, is a really big day. On Thursday, GDP figures for the first quarter of 2013 will be published.
It is a sign of how low expectations have fallen, that all the economic commentators are saying the best we can expect is to have kept out of a triple-dip recession – with falls in output due to the weather, among other things, making that unprecedented outcome more likely.
There is a problem with all of these predictions, which should be obvious to those of us living in the real world: Short-termism.
It’s all about how the UK managed in the last quarter, how it will manage in the next; what the situation is today. What about six months from now? What about next year? What about 2015, when we’re all expecting an election and the chance to banish this nightmare? What about 2017-18, when 0sborne still reckons he’ll have eliminated the budget deficit (fat chance)?
The fact is that the only options open to a Chancellor in the current climate are unpalatable to the Boy.
He could boost investment in infrastructure, in a bid to make this country a better place to open – and carry out – business. The trouble is, this tends to be a long-term project and he no longer has the time. His chances would have been better if he had started this in 2010, but his government cancelled as many such projects as they could back then, claiming it was more important to cut public spending in order to balance the books.
That was a vain hope. Without new investment, the country has lost revenue.
But if that is unpalatable, the other alternative is likely to make him choke on his pate de foie gras (or whatever it is these posh boys ingest): Increase the spending power of the poor.
It is known that the ‘trickle-down effect’ is a myth – giving all of a country’s money to the very rich, in the belief that they will spend it, boosting the economy and the income of the poor, is nonsense. What they actually do is bank it – in offshore tax havens, most likely. That is what 0sborne has been doing; it is another reason the economy has bombed.
It is also a rock-solid fact that poor people do spend their money – or as much as they can get their hands on. When you are constantly struggling to make ends meet, it’s very hard to keep cash in the bank – you have to spend it on food, clothes, rent, heat, light, water… the list is endless, because it constantly repeats.
When you don’t have much cash, as Edmund Blackadder once said, you feel like a pelican. Everywhere you turn, there’s a large bill in front of you.
That money does work for society. It reinvigorates the economy as it filters through different hands. And it brings with it the extra joy of fiscal multipliers – every pound that gets put into the economy is worth more after it has been through.
The trouble is, Gideon shut off that money supply. He raised VAT, making it harder for working-class people and those on benefits to buy certain economy-boosting products, and then he and Iain Duncan Smith spent the last few years on their project to depress wages.
(For clarity, it goes like this: The DWP makes the benefit system so difficult to navigate that people in receipt have to do their utmost to get off-benefit as soon as possible. This means they are constantly looking for jobs, which in turn makes it possible for employers to refuse pay rises for their workforce, with the classic line that “there are plenty of other people who’d be happy to have your job, you know!” You didn’t really think the benefit cap was about making work pay, did you?)
Say what you like about Labour, but they’ve got the right idea when it comes to the money supply. Ed Balls wants to cut VAT; he wants to bring back the 10 per cent tax rate for the lowest-paid; he wants to bring in a National Insurance holiday for companies that agree to take on new employees.
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