Softly, Softly?

Had a slightly frantic round of emails with The Lads That Are Left [blog posts passim]: the last outpost of the boys from The Green who went to Lordswood School for Boys and survived: all of us boomers and all of us now retired to various parts of the UK/globe; curmudgeons all, The Last of The Summer Wine with an edge. The debate was - obviously - about the dropping of the winter fuel payment for us pensioners not on extra benefits. Some were reacting instantly, instinctively and rightly negatively to the ratification in the commons this week of the bill enacting this measure. I agree wholeheartedly and am personally affected by it. But I can't say it will have the same impact on us that it will on many, many others less fortunate than us: it won't. I'm just being honest when I say that: pleading false poverty for political edge is essentially wrong in my book.

However, I do think that the new government has on the face of it, screwed the pooch with the decision to take such apparently low-hanging fruit for relatively little prima facie return. For a party that fought a long and intelligent battle for the hearts and minds of an electorate that had essentially given up any remaining faith in UK politics and politicians to gain such a massive parliamentary majority to form a new government, this move seems a PR optics misstep at the very least. So why the choice of such an apparently unpopular target? Why would such a canny party machine, that has managed to expunge one of its worst electoral defeats and turn itself around to where it is today in a single parliamentary term, seek to damage its image from the off. Seen from a boomer pensioner's perspective that's exactly what it is: a major gaffe. Seen from the perspective of those not in my demographic, we as a group have been characterised by others as simply a drain on the state, drawing 'benefits' and clogging up the NHS and care services: an increasingly long-lived generation simply in the way.

The problem with this narrative is that it simply is not true. The State Pension is, as I've said many times before, a contributory fund which was designed such that one would be looked after from cradle to grave by the state, free of charge at the point of need. End of. Ergo, the deal we had with the state and the society of which we were and are a part, under the social contract, still stands. What was not part of the original contract was the winter fuel payment: that was an add-on handed out as a sop to cover for the failings of corrupt and corrupted government - by the then new New Labour government, for chrissakes - and an economy rent asunder by the failings of neo-liberalist capitalism and Thatcherism over the previous thirteen years. Not part of the original deal, but crumbs from on high to keep the peasants quiet. Rather than deal with the underlying problems, Blair's New Labour chose to continue the narrative themselves in Maggie's Farm's wake.

If the system had continued to work as originally conceived, and the bean-counters had done their jobs properly, the winter fuel payment needn't have happened in the first place, let alone become part of the overall 'benefit' of the pension. Unpopular and PR-negative as it may seem, the logic of the decision to means-test it, however apparently cruel, is unassailable. Which brings me onto my take on it all. Which is that there will be changes afoot in the structure and scope of our pension system being hatched in the wings of this piece of theatre, perhaps to realign the system to its original remit and remove any suggestion of 'handout' from the central core of the system, leaving hardship needs to be handled by the welfare state's actual benefits.

Call me an optimist, but I really don't see a venal underbelly to the new government or its actors. And they have the most enormous shit-heap to deal with at the bequest of the Conservatives, and with limited means and a shaky world economy and politics as a backdrop; also, they have just a few short years to prove themselves worthy of tackling a Sisyphean task that really demands a full generation's-worth of time to finish. So, giving them a little leeway to get their feet firmly planted in the job would seem to be at least a reasonable ask: we've waited long enough for change, and I think we all know that won't happen overnight, or maybe even within our lifetimes. At our age, short-termism would seem to be all we've got, but that's no excuse for reactionary thinking, brothers and sisters...