A Right, Not a Benefit...

So, the Tories want to scrap National Insurance. Over successive decades since its inception as a fundamental plank of the social contract between government and the electorate, this basic contribution - specifically implemented to fund the National Health Service and the State Pension scheme - has been bastardised and mutated into 'just another tax'. The problem is now that this view has been normalised for and internalised by a large section of the populous, just as the State Pension is now being characterised as a 'benefit', which implies that it is somehow negotiable and subject to means-testing. No, no, and thrice no! We all pay into the fund throughout our working lives, in order to secure a modicum of financial security on retirement: this has been and should remain non-negotiable, and something that we should all fight tooth and nail to maintain. These are our rights, paid for by us, out of our earnings: let no-one say otherwise.

Apart from the fact that the fund - much like the road fund licence [road tax] was intended to maintain the highways - was designed, intended and implemented to be a non-voluntary, contributory scheme to pay for the thing that is most basic to all of the population: to provide free healthcare at the point of need. These pots of cash were meant to be ring-fenced funds to serve no other than their intended purpose, rather than simply become yet another form of amorphous, general taxation. These notions of an agreed national communality of purpose and agreement have gradually been eroded by successive, mostly Tory governments, and now are being used as bargaining chips in the insane Dutch auction that our fiscal policy has become. If NI goes - and I hope to God that an incoming Labour government would redress that situation with absolute urgency - then it would only be a matter of time before everyone's right to a safe retirement and proper healthcare truly will be a fleeting moment in our history.