Tendring Topics – on line
‘The rest of us…………..’
A regular blog reader has written to point out how cleverly, and how easily, the government and much of the national press have managed to stir up resentment against large minorities of the population by telling ‘the rest of us’ (the right-thinking, hardworking, tax-paying readers of The Mail, the Express and the Sun) that they are having to pay for ‘those others’ to live lives of idleness and luxury.
Have you noticed, he asks, how often this government (and the press) have tried to turn the perceived majority (who feel hard done by) against the minority (who they suggest are pampered and undeserving)? They are doing it with public sector pensions; claiming that these "gold plated" pensions are being paid for by the vast majority of "us" who don't enjoy the same pensions themselves. The same was true of hard working families paying for the Benefits of others who are claiming more than the "average wage". What’s more, we were all paying for the education of idle and dissolute students and paying the rent of people "choosing" to live in high rent property at "our expense". It's an easy sell.
It occurred to me that there are many other situations in which the same argument could be used.
What about the minority of kids staying on in 6th form while their hard working classmates who leave school at 15 have to work hard on building sites and shopping malls, paying taxes to keep them at school?
Then there are all these people who indulge in dangerous sports - sky diving, rock climbing and yachting for instance. They expect us to pay for their rescue and medical care when they break their necks or have to be plucked from peril in expensive helicopters when their boats capsize or they get lost on a glacier. All of this has to be paid for by the rest of us who are content with a package holiday and sky television. We can't afford yachts, private aircraft or trips to the Himalayas!
. Then there are the young offenders. They expect us to pay for their board and lodging when they are locked up; in effect hotel accommodation which most of us couldn’t afford. Maybe if parents of delinquents had to pay for it they would exercise more control over their wayward kids. And we mustn’t forget the ‘on the fiddle’ MPs whom we all love to hate. Those who have been caught out could well afford to pay board and lodging for their 18 months, or whatever, sentence. As for the rest of convicted criminals, perhaps they could pay for their board and lodging with something like a student loan, to be paid off in instalments on their release!
Maybe your blog readers could think of more crass examples!
Maybe – but I can think of an example that really isn’t particularly crass. How about the directors of the FOOTSE 100 businesses, Britain’s one hundred most profitable enterprises. According to a news report last week their retirement package (I’m sure they don’t have the nerve to call it ‘a pension’) averages £160,000 a year. Why should we pay to keep them in luxury when our provision for retirement (even if we have a public service pension!) isn’t as much as a tiny fraction of that sum?
You didn’t think that we did pay them? Well, we certainly don’t support them as we do public officials. The latter are paid out of taxation and, through our elected representatives, we can have at least some control over the size of their pay cheques.
The Private Sector directors’ wealth doesn’t simply drop straight from Heaven. It comes from our already-half-empty pockets and our depleted bank balances. Every time we put petrol into our fuel tanks, or spend our devalued pounds on food, clothing, electronic gadgetry or virtually anything else, we are adding to the wealth of those leading ‘captains of commerce’. The only way that they can be induced to make their fair contribution to the reduction of the nation’s debt is by a drastic reform of the income tax system – something that no government has had the courage and resolution to attempt.
A Town full of Layabouts?
That must surely have been the first thought in readers’ minds when they read the shock/horror headline in the daily Gazette on 28th June. 22,600 in town say they do not want a job. Colchester, so it seems, has 27,700 residents classed as ‘economically inactive’ and only 5,100 of them want a job and are looking for work.
Needless to say it has attracted its fair share of comment from readers who didn’t read beyond the headline. ‘I too, would like to lie in bed all day and live on benefit – but (unlike those wasters!) I’ve got a social conscience’ was a common theme..
I reckon though, that if a similar tally had been taken in the late ‘40s or ‘50s, an even higher proportion of the capable-of-work population would have been similarly ’economically inactive’. Those 22,600 will include folk who have taken early retirement and are, in fact, supplementing their private pensions with small part-time or freelance jobs. I ‘retired’ from the Council’s service just before I was 59 – but it was to be a freelance writer, which is what I had always wanted. The Labour Exchange and Social Security Offices might have seen me as being, ‘without gainful employment’ but HM Customs and Revenue, who assessed my income tax liability, knew otherwise!
Then again, it has only been during the last few decades (I date it from the avaricious eighties, the age of Thatcherism) that married women, or perhaps to be PC I should say ‘women in stable relationships,’ ceased to see themselves as primarily ‘home makers’ rather than ‘bread winners’. Many, who continued in full-time employment when first married, found looking after the home and the family a satisfying full-time job once a baby had arrived. They would certainly have been counted among the economically inactive who, ‘did not want a job’.
Nowadays women are ‘emancipated from the kitchen sink’ only to find themselves enslaved to a supermarket check-out, a restaurant or hotel, a factory floor or a shop counter. They work till the last possible moment before their baby is born and return to wage-slavery the minute that they can arrange childcare. It may be though that even today, there are some women who find that looking after their home and children is career enough for them. Such women would add to the numbers of Colchester’s willingly ‘workless’.
I am constantly being told ‘you can’t put the clock back’ and in this case I am not sure that I would want to. I would certainly not wish to deprive anyone, man or woman, of the chance of becoming a doctor, or lawyer, or journalist, or police officer if they are yearning for such a career. For some women though, being a loving and competent wife and mother may be career enough.
We should be thankful for them. In the ‘bad old days’ when most women with children stayed at home to look after them, there were many fewer schoolgirl pregnancies, much less sexually transmitted disease among juveniles, less drug-taking and alcohol abuse, much less juvenile crime and much less antisocial behaviour. It was stay-at-home mums, who were ‘economically inactive’ but were always there when their children came home from school or in from play, that we had to thank for that.
Lord Hanningfield
Lord Hanningfield, former leader of Essex County Council, has been sentenced to nine months (of which I suppose he’ll actually serve four) imprisonment for fraudulently claiming, as a member of the House of Lords, expenses that he hadn’t incurred. It’s a good deal less than the penalty dealt out to members of the House of Commons who had similarly defrauded the public.
I hope that this was because he was old, frail, and in precarious health, and because the rules for Lords’ expenses are rather less clear-cut than those for the Commons – and not because, ‘The poor chap made a bad mistake and has to pay for it – but he’s one of us really; not like those bounders ‘on the make’ in the ‘other House’.
I don’t think that there was much point in spending public money on giving any of them a custodial sentence. They’re not going to do the same thing again and, for those who had relished being in the spotlight, exposure and public disgrace were surely punishment enough. As far as I am concerned it would have been sufficient for them admit their guilt, publicly apologise, and attempt to pay back the money that they had fraudulently obtained. There was little chance of that happening in Lord Hanningfield’s case. He really seems to believe that he has done nothing wrong. If, as has been reported, he intends to appeal I have little doubt that the Appeals Court will think otherwise – and could even increase his sentence.
We are told that his expenses claims as Leader of the Essex County Council are now under investigation. Here there could well be even larger sums involved. I hope that there will be no attempt by his former colleagues (some of whose own expenses claims might also merit examination!) to sweep the conclusions of that investigation under the County Hall carpet.
Now it’s getting personal!
News headlines and discussions on radio and tv following last week’s day of strike action by public service unions have made it clear to me that I am no longer a relatively impartial observer of the nation’s problems and of attempts to solve them. I am myself a major part of their cause!
We are, so they assure us, all living too long. That is the reason why those public service pensions are unaffordable and why everyone is going to have to wait longer for his or her state retirement pension. It is also why we have to have cut-backs in services for the elderly and the disabled, why we have to review the ways in which we pay for them to have social care either in their own homes or in a nursing home and, since not even the oldest of us is immortal, we have to consider the best – and, of course, the most cost effective - way of overseeing our final departure.
My latest birthday was over a month ago, and I am just getting used to the idea of being 90. What is more, I have been in receipt of a public service pension for over thirty years! I have certainly received value for the six percent of my salary that, for forty years, I paid towards the provision of that pension. I do remember though officials, on a considerably higher salary than me, whose lives ended while they were still in the council’s employment, and many others who died within a few years of retirement. Superannuation schemes have to take the rough with the smooth. As far as the local government scheme is concerned, I am part of ‘the rough’!
During the past decade I have, I fear, made quite a lot of use of the services of the NHS. I don’t feel guilty about this. The NHS is funded from general taxation. I have paid taxes all my life (I am lucky enough to be still liable for income tax) but, prior to the past ten years, I made few demands on the Health Service.
What of the future? So far, thanks at least partly to that public service pension, I have needed no support from Social Services. ‘Old people like to remain in their own homes and keep their independence’. This was an oft-repeated mantra of Lord Hanningfield’s, especially when the county council was selling off its care homes!
That is true up to a point. But I think that I would prefer residence in a good care home to the kind of ‘independence’ that consists of being roused every morning by a couple of professional ‘care workers’; washed, dressed and left in an easy chair in front of the telly until some time in the evening when they would return, undress me and get me into bed again, after a day punctuated only by changes of tv programme and the arrival of ‘meals on wheels’.
I sincerely hope that before I get to that stage, whatever may be left of me will have taken the advice given in a brief poem by A.E. Housman:
The hollow fires burn out to black,
The lamps are guttering low.
So square your shoulders, lift your pack,
And leave your friends and go.
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