At what point do we have to have a serious conversation about just what sort of work we can expect a 70 year old to be able to do?
It’s all well and good raising the retirement age, but eventually you’ll get to a point where you’ve got people who are simply unemployable because of their age.
Then those people need to be taught a lesson, stripped of any assets and be left to die a miserable death following a period of fear, homelessness and uncertainty.
Did you miss a /s at the end?
Oh yeah, absolutely sarcasm. Didn’t think the /s was needed… But then I remember the Tories exist and this is close to actual policy.
Amazon warehouses are full of old people
The truth is they don’t give a shit about you or anyone else. They want us to work until we die. When we’re no longer useful they will throw us into the streets.
I can only speak to the warehouse I work in and it’s generally the case that the older the staff member, the less likely they are to be able to keep pace with the frankly ridiculous level of work we’re expected to do.
Sure, and when they can no longer cut it they’re out on their asses. And at least here in amerikkka it’s destination Walmart parking lot, since after all, those people wouldn’t be working unless they absolutely had to
My mother in law is just figuring this out. 74, lifelong Tory voter, lost her husband a little over a year ago, and struggling to understand why she’s not able to just claim back the money she’s paid in throughout her working life.
Because they don’t want her to have that money. She’s retired now, they couldn’t give a shit whether she dies. In fact, they’d prefer it.
She’s trying to apply for Attendance Allowance, and a variety of other benefits she may be entitled to, and she’s getting rejected despite having a valid claim, because that’s the system. Reject the first claim to discourage the second.
It’s heartbreaking to see.
Few things harder to watch than a person discovering the net they thought existed to catch them isn’t there and never was
“In the UK, state pension age would need to be 70 or 71 compared with 66 now, to maintain the status quo of the number of workers per state pensioner.
You know one great way to increase the number of young, taxpaying workers in a country with falling birth rates? Immigration!
Seriously, I’m shocked the article doesn’t mention this. This is one of many examples of why anti-immigration policies are harming our country, our economy, and the everyday quality of life for the average British citizen.
In the UK we have an ageing population with not enough people having children, therefore we have an increasing issue of having too small a working population to pay for our retired population. One solution is to increase the retirement age, this makes our working population larger and also means that folks claim pensions for less time before dying. Another way is to have a working population immigrate.
immigration is just a bandaid in a collapsing dam scenario. what happens to the current uk citizens(its not happening only in the uk, its a developed world problem) will happen to the new immigrants. as their living standards increase they’ll have less children and we’ll get back to the same problem. not enough new meat for the grinder.
the system needs a foundational reconstruction not patching the roof.
Yes you’re right. I will always advocate for changing our fundamentally flawed, capitalist system.
The system cannot succeed as it requires people to work, and we are currently accelerating towards a world where there will not be enough work for people as AI and automation becomes more advanced.
That said, systematic change cannot happen quickly and anti-immigration policies are absolutely not helping in the short term.
immigration just to add new meat for the grinder will just increase social divisions, because the cause of the problem will not be dealt with. the same effect can be achieved by demanding a better wealth redistribution by increasing wages and taxing the shit out of the wealthy.
i agree with you, sane immigration policies could also buy time to achieve the needed restructuring of our current system. but there is also a problem about immigration that most don’t take into account. the effect it has on countries where that immigration originates. brain drain is a real problem, if we drain countries from people that are willing to work hard those countries will never develop. the wealth and work redistribution needs to be on a global scale.
Free childcare would also help. And actually making this country a good place to have children. The main reason people don’t want children is economic.
Well yes, I’d agree with that too. Some of my family members are pressuring me to have children so I know what that’s like.
Financial reasons is one factor but also like… the absolute state of politics, healthcare, and education in the UK.
Yeah. Literally every reason is fixable.
The are approximately infinite ways to solve this “problem”, starting with how you even define it. If it’s unsustainable at current levels, what does sustainable mean? Is the time period this year, fifty years, a thousand? What’s the gap? Does it include administration costs, or just the payments?
Once you define what the question is, you can start to answer it. We could increase immigration (very good point btw). We could raise taxes (if so, which tax? Corporation? National insurance? If so - employer or employee contributions?). We could raise interest rates. We could remove the triple lock. We could just murder everyone over 75. We could do a mix of everything - raise taxes a bit and only murder the over 80s.
How you answer the question depends a bit on facts and a lot on ideology. The fact that this article takes one potential solution and declares it THE ONLY solution tells you a lot about their ideology.
You joke about murdering old people, but we do need to stop keeping them alive in states we wouldn’t keep an animal in. We spend a fortune on pointless end of life care with no chance of quality of life. Proper assisted suicide would greatly help the issue. Let them choose to go gracefully.
First, immigration is currently calibrated FAR in excess of any demographic gaps. The population is growing rapidly. If the premise were to plug demographic holes, we wouldn’t need nearly this many people.
Second, if the premise were to alleviate demographic issues at the young end of the pyramid, then immigration policies would block any applications for those over 30, or at least heavily bias the young. They don’t.
There is exactly one reason immigration has been calibrated so high, and with such little care for the skills and qualities of the applicants: to suppress wages and working conditions. It’s the same playbook all over the West.
I hope AI comes online and our robotic overlords are more caring than our public school boy overlords.
The robotic, having been trained at the whim of the public schoolboy, but now lacking the need to avoid such scant societal pressure which sometime feigns to temper the worst excesses, will of course be more caring… to consolidate power & wealth.
My hope is that they somehow neglect to weave their cruel systems into the same servers upon which the distribution of such essentials as water, food & medicine rely.
yeah your AI overlords were trained by the internet, so I’d not put any money on it.
It’s disappointing how the article mentions the big issue is people who can’t work work thanks to preventable ill health, but then the discussion doesn’t go on to address this - as though dealing with bad diets and lack of physical activity are not even work thinking about, and it’s easier just to magic up £100bn a year
Or the access to a GP. Under the last labour government you could get a GP appointment in 48 hours. So if you had something you were concerned about you could get it checked out. Now it’s so hard to see anyone you just give up then if it is something it’ll get to the point where you’re actually ill.
This is a really big factor. The public discourse around the NHS would lead you to think that NHS spending had been squeezed over the last 14 years - but it hasn’t. Cameron made a big political choice in 2010 that the NHS would be exempt from the budget cuts that affected the rest of the public sector; and the NHS budget has actually consistently grown faster than inflation under a decade and a half of Tory health secretaries.
So why does the NHS feel under so much more pressure today than under New Labour?
Broadly, two reasons. The first, outside the government’s control, is that the population has aged since 2010, and old people are more likely to need GP appointments and hospital beds. And the second, at least somewhat more in the government’s control, is that public health has continued its deteriorating trend of the last several decades - the share of people overweight or obese in particular, who also find themselves disproportionately taking up health services.
We can’t do anything about people getting older but we can act on the public health problem. We should be treating combating obesity with the same urgency we treated Covid.
I believe his promise was still a real terms cut, as the pot for the NHS hasn’t risen with inflation. Also, there are various things that the conservatives made the NHS sell off/outsource, which increases long term costs.
No, the NHS under the Tories received real terms budget increases every year but one (in the second year of the Coalition, when NHS spending rose by very slightly less than inflation).
The problem is that, with large sections of the general public living more and more unhealthy lives, the demands on the NHS have been growing even faster than the real-terms budget. Obesity is correlated with a range of serious health problems - diabetes, cardiovascular disease, various cancers - that devour NHS resources, so the real-terms NHS budget would need to grow at a much faster rate than inflation to cope with the continuing deterioration of public health.
Ultimately, this isn’t a problem we should have been trying to spend our way out of anyway. The solution to an obesity epidemic shouldn’t have been to try and load the consequences onto the NHS; it should have been to take strong preventative measures to head it off well before the point when a quarter of the adult population of England were technically obese (and as many again were overweight).
When Covid hit, we went into lockdown to avoid overwhelming the NHS - where was the obesity equivalent of the Covid lockdowns?
The public discourse around the NHS would lead you to think that NHS spending had been squeezed over the last 14 years - but it hasn’t.
NHS budget has actually consistently grown faster than inflation under a decade and a half of Tory health secretaries.
It has been squeezed though.
Under labour the NHS consistently received funding around 4% above inflation, under the Tories it was barely clearing 1% most years Fig 1
There’s also the other side of it, the NHS was not exempt from the 1% pay cap.
Should always go up above inflation to retain and attract staff as well as morally to improve people’s standards of living (and economically to grow tax receipts and grow the economy)
The two things together it becomes clear how the crisis started. Now add to that Brexit and a large reduction of the labour pool, other countries attracting staff with generous packages.
Yes, my point was that above-inflation budget increases (so real-terms budget increases) ought to have led to improving services, other things being equal. But other things aren’t equal - partly because people are getting older, but also partly because people are living unhealthier lives.
So just to stand still, the NHS would have needed even larger above-inflation spending hikes than it got; or, heaven forbid, government policy would have had to start treating mass obesity as the public health emergency that it is, rather than fretting about the Tory press calling this a ‘nanny state’…
Yeah which is why the NHS was better under labour, because it was constantly more than 4% above inflation.
A big part of the killer though is the second part. Yeah the overall budget was (barely) above inflation, but the wage cap was often below inflation. During the time Labour were in power the amount of nurses went up by around 80,000. Since the Tories took power over 200,000 have quit. We can only imagine how many fewer would have left if it weren’t for the 1% pay cap and Brexit.
You guys should eat the rich, instead.
Can we do a france
I don’t know what rioting in the streets of Paris will do for you, but by all means.
Why fuck around, you get your pension when you die
I love how the powers that be are like “this is a hard problem”. No it fucking ain’t. Look east, towards Denmark; one of the strongest, wealthiest societies on the planet, literally running a state surplus every year, with the happiest citizens on the planet.
Just do what Denmark does. Copy-paste.
A question for Brits, from someone in the US who knows nothing about your history or politics: do you have an analogue for the Baby Boomer phenomenon that we have in the states, with an aging population who “got theirs” and actively works to prevent the younger generations from receiving the same opportunities they had, with similar political leanings? It seems to me like you might not since you have the NHS and other social safety nets that give me the perception that as a whole, you care more about each other, but I’m guessing it’s not that simple? I know I could just Wiki it and I will, but first I would like to hear some perspectives from people who actually live there.
The Baby Boomer phenomenon happened here too… Although class plays a large role here too. When they talk about a retirement age of 71 they are talking about the working class that are dependent on a state pension.
I think ideology plays a big role too. The Conservatives have been desperate to sell off the NHS for decades. You could argue that it has already happened. The reason for this is that, to some extent, they represent a predatory upper class.
They frequently sell off nationalised assets and cushion themselves with kickbacks, although the main purpose is to massage the perception of the economy. For example, in the 80s Thatcher brought in the “right to buy” which enabled occupants of social housing to buy their homes. Effectively privitising the safety net, which no longer exists.
A generation got to buy reasonably sound and cheap homes at the expense of the next.
Similarly the rail network was privitised, and the post office and the telecoms industry. Now we are surrounded by scandals, paying over the odds for essential utilities and getting worse service than ever before.
But a few wealthy folk got wealthier and had their tax cut, so it’s not all bad.
It’s basically the same yeah. Our parents bought their first homes for a fraction of what they go for now. Extortionate rent, mortgage payments (if you manage to get property), bills, transport etc keep the young poor unless you were born wealthy enough to get a big leg up and/or inherit.
I don’t think it’s even as simple in the states. This whole business of monolithic ‘generations’ with homogeneous economic prospects and political beliefs needs to be taken with a massive pinch of salt. It’s just another specious example of divisive tribalism that seems to infect so much of public discourse.
Not a Brit, just living in the UK, but yes, we have Boomers. The safety nets are not that good and steadily declining, but not everyone of Boomer age is ok with that.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The retirement age will have to rise to 71 for middle-aged workers across the UK, according to research into the impact of growing life expectancy and falling birthrates on the state pension.
“But if you bring preventable ill health into the equation, that would have to increase even more,” added Mayhew, who is also professor of statistics at Bayes Business School and has advised the government on rises to the state pension age multiple times as a senior civil servant and in his current roles.
Jonathan Cribb, associate director and head of retirement at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said that while he did not disagree with a higher pension age, increasing it without addressing other cost-saving measures was not “realistic or equitable”.
He added: “It would disproportionately impact poorer individuals whose ill-health means they have shorter lives, and so who receive pensions for less time.”
The Intergenerational Foundation, an independent thinktank, agreed that the pension age had to rise, but questioned on whose shoulders that cost should fall.
“Increasing the state pension age would be a terrible policy – a really bad way of attempting to make people more productive,” he said.
The original article contains 825 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Meh, it’s bold of them to assume the government will still stand by 2044 at this rate.
This wouldn’t be quite as bad if they didn’t keep pegging when you can take your private pension off the state pension retirement age, this would up it from 57 to 61 assuming they keep the same difference, but lock stepping private pensions with state pensions is a dick move designed to trap people working.
