In a Guardian article John Cridland, Director General of the CBI, paints a glowing picture of public service pensioners living off the fat of the land on pensions funded by the taxpayer whilst the sternly realistic private sector cuts its coat according to its cloth. Somehow he fails to mention the absurdly high pensions paid to Fred the Shred and others of that ilk, nor does he mention what pension he expects for himself.
Several facts reveal Cridland's views to be somewhat distorted to say the least. Lord Hutton's report shows that the flow of income into public service pensions actually exceeds the amount paid out, and that the costs of public service pensions will fall dramatically once the current "spike" of baby boomers has been passed. Unions point out that the average ex-public servant's pension is very modest indeed because most are low paid, and a friend of mine who has worked in local government and knows about these things assures me that in Yorkshire at least local government pensions are funded from investments and the "pot" is healthily in credit.
Clearly if we are going to live longer then we need to pay more for our pensions or receive less, or a bit of both, but the debate should be based on facts rather than the bias of "private sector good public sector bad." We also need to recognise the purpose of a pension, which is to avoid penury once one's earning life is over, rather than to provide vast funds for the life of Riley or to finance advantages for ones children and grandchildren. I should have thought that about half the average income would be enough to avoid destitution, and the average income should be enough to provide a very comfortable existence.
At present values the average income is about £24 000 a year so I see no reason for any pensions to rise above that, and the minimum pension should be around £12 000 a year or £230 a week. It seems to me that the minimum figure should be provided by the state out of taxation, regardless, and the "top up" from contributions. Then we could all get on to enjoy the luxurious lifestyle that our sophisticated economy can sustain without all this fuss, distortion an jealousy.
Monday, 14 March 2011
Thursday, 10 March 2011
Liberal Democrats, body language and the NHS
On Tuesday a Guardian leader discussed the present predicament of the Liberal Democrats and I am pleased that today they have published the letter I wrote in response. Perfectly reasonably, and without altering the sense, my letter was edited down, so here is the full version, with the cut (less than savage in this case) in bold.
Dear Editor,
Oh that it were true that “Lib Dems stare silently at their feet whenever the coalition does something particularly egregious…” (Call for a lost voice, 8 March) Unfortunately, as a Liberal/Liberal Democrat activist for almost 50 years I am haunted by the very opposite, particularly the vision of Nick Clegg putting his arm round George Osborne and congratulating him on that first budget which betrayed all the teachings of Keynes and the principles of Beveridge. Ouch! And by all accounts Danny Alexander relishes even more than the Tories the cuts which are systematically destroying our welfare state founded on Liberal principles.
If arcane rules of collective responsibility preclude Liberal Democrats in government from verbally dissociating themselves form decisions alien to the tenets of Liberal Democracy, than at least some distancing by body language would be welcome. For liberal Democrat MPs not members of the government an opportunity arises to establish the party’s true stance at this weekend’s Spring Conference. An amendment heavily critical of the NHS reforms and in particular the opening up of NHS services to “any willing provider” is to be debated. By supporting this they, along with like-minded activists, can express their vigorous opposition and the party can be seen to be doing its best to stop this ideologically driven quasi privatisation in its tracks.
Yours faithfully.
Another article in today's Guardian hints that opposition to the Tory proposals is gaining ground in our party. If it is successful, and the Tories are forced to backtrack, this would not only be good for the nation's physical and mental health, but also our political health if it begins the restoration of the Liberal Democrat party's reputation after the debacle of the student fees issue.
So all power the the elbow of our activists true to the faith at our spring conference.
Dear Editor,
Oh that it were true that “Lib Dems stare silently at their feet whenever the coalition does something particularly egregious…” (Call for a lost voice, 8 March) Unfortunately, as a Liberal/Liberal Democrat activist for almost 50 years I am haunted by the very opposite, particularly the vision of Nick Clegg putting his arm round George Osborne and congratulating him on that first budget which betrayed all the teachings of Keynes and the principles of Beveridge. Ouch! And by all accounts Danny Alexander relishes even more than the Tories the cuts which are systematically destroying our welfare state founded on Liberal principles.
If arcane rules of collective responsibility preclude Liberal Democrats in government from verbally dissociating themselves form decisions alien to the tenets of Liberal Democracy, than at least some distancing by body language would be welcome. For liberal Democrat MPs not members of the government an opportunity arises to establish the party’s true stance at this weekend’s Spring Conference. An amendment heavily critical of the NHS reforms and in particular the opening up of NHS services to “any willing provider” is to be debated. By supporting this they, along with like-minded activists, can express their vigorous opposition and the party can be seen to be doing its best to stop this ideologically driven quasi privatisation in its tracks.
Yours faithfully.
Another article in today's Guardian hints that opposition to the Tory proposals is gaining ground in our party. If it is successful, and the Tories are forced to backtrack, this would not only be good for the nation's physical and mental health, but also our political health if it begins the restoration of the Liberal Democrat party's reputation after the debacle of the student fees issue.
So all power the the elbow of our activists true to the faith at our spring conference.
Tuesday, 8 March 2011
Barnsley, UKIP and the Liberal Democrats
A friend of mine has written the following letter for publication in Bradford's local paper, The Telegraph and Argus
Sir
Nigel Farage is entitled to UKIP’s twenty four hours of glory following their second place in the Barnsley Central by-election. However, he and UKIP are surely getting ahead of themselves in prophesying that they will oust the Liberal Democrats as the UK’s third party.
Yes, the Barnsley result was a shocker for the Liberal Democrats. But as a political party we have a philosophical basis and one which is both broader, more intellectually coherent and more optimistic than the narrow anti-Europeanism of UKIP. Our roots go back not just to John Stuart Mill but beyond to the thinkers of the Enlightenment and to John Milton.
Thirteen years of New Labour, with its encroaching state authoritarianism (not to mention an illegal war), disqualify Ed Miliband’s party from any early return to the moral high ground. The Conservative Party continues to contain too many people with sharp elbows prepared to let the devil take the hindmost.
Liberalism, with its 20th century contributions from Keynes and Beveridge (it would be handy if Clegg & co. paid more attention to these) remains the party of both individual liberty and societal fairness.
I for one shall “keep the faith”.
John Cole.
And so say all of us
Sir
Nigel Farage is entitled to UKIP’s twenty four hours of glory following their second place in the Barnsley Central by-election. However, he and UKIP are surely getting ahead of themselves in prophesying that they will oust the Liberal Democrats as the UK’s third party.
Yes, the Barnsley result was a shocker for the Liberal Democrats. But as a political party we have a philosophical basis and one which is both broader, more intellectually coherent and more optimistic than the narrow anti-Europeanism of UKIP. Our roots go back not just to John Stuart Mill but beyond to the thinkers of the Enlightenment and to John Milton.
Thirteen years of New Labour, with its encroaching state authoritarianism (not to mention an illegal war), disqualify Ed Miliband’s party from any early return to the moral high ground. The Conservative Party continues to contain too many people with sharp elbows prepared to let the devil take the hindmost.
Liberalism, with its 20th century contributions from Keynes and Beveridge (it would be handy if Clegg & co. paid more attention to these) remains the party of both individual liberty and societal fairness.
I for one shall “keep the faith”.
John Cole.
And so say all of us
Monday, 7 March 2011
CAAT Petition
I have been a passive supporter of the Campaign Against Arm Trade (CAAT) for many years, having been introduced to it by a member of one of my WEA Classes who was an enthusiastic anti-arms campaigner as well as an advocate of the wit and wisdom of the Methodist Recorder.
I regret that I've never found the time to come to grips with the detail of the iniquity of Britain's trade in arms but of the following broad principles I am sure:
1. We supply arms to all sorts of unsavoury regimes. The excuse is that every country is entitled to defend itself and there are rigorous rules about what we sell and to whom. Such rules are either meaningless or flouted and much of what we sell can equally be used for internal repression. Tear gas to Colonel Gaddafi is just one example. David Cameron's embarrassing trip flogging arms in the Middle East at this highly inappropriate time just highlights the hypocrisy that has been going on for years.
2. A powerful excuse is that the arms industry is highly profitable and provides lots of employment. In truth this is only so because it is heavily subsidised by the government. If our universities were subsidised to a fraction of the money poured into arms they would continue to be world class without either difficulty or charging tuition fees to domestic students. Umpteen other worthwhile industries would also thrive if the subsidies were diverted to them (wind and wave power technology to name but two).
3. Employment could be maintained be converting arms factories to other more worthwhile products. For example, anyone who has ever travelled on an unsurfaced road in the Third World would know that any resemblance between a bus and a tank is to be welcomed. Hence the tank factory in Leeds could be converted to building robust buses and trucks for export to Africa.
CAAT is currently organising a petition, "This is not OK",the first tranche of which will be presented to Downing Street on Wednesday 9th March. Please find it by clicking this link and then adding your name to this very worthwhile manifestation of the Big Society.
I regret that I've never found the time to come to grips with the detail of the iniquity of Britain's trade in arms but of the following broad principles I am sure:
1. We supply arms to all sorts of unsavoury regimes. The excuse is that every country is entitled to defend itself and there are rigorous rules about what we sell and to whom. Such rules are either meaningless or flouted and much of what we sell can equally be used for internal repression. Tear gas to Colonel Gaddafi is just one example. David Cameron's embarrassing trip flogging arms in the Middle East at this highly inappropriate time just highlights the hypocrisy that has been going on for years.
2. A powerful excuse is that the arms industry is highly profitable and provides lots of employment. In truth this is only so because it is heavily subsidised by the government. If our universities were subsidised to a fraction of the money poured into arms they would continue to be world class without either difficulty or charging tuition fees to domestic students. Umpteen other worthwhile industries would also thrive if the subsidies were diverted to them (wind and wave power technology to name but two).
3. Employment could be maintained be converting arms factories to other more worthwhile products. For example, anyone who has ever travelled on an unsurfaced road in the Third World would know that any resemblance between a bus and a tank is to be welcomed. Hence the tank factory in Leeds could be converted to building robust buses and trucks for export to Africa.
CAAT is currently organising a petition, "This is not OK",the first tranche of which will be presented to Downing Street on Wednesday 9th March. Please find it by clicking this link and then adding your name to this very worthwhile manifestation of the Big Society.
Friday, 4 March 2011
Tories, Murdoch and the Competition Commission
Arrogance, effrontery, nerve, chutzpah,audacity, brussenness; it is hard to find a word to describe the Tory mindset in the Murdoch/Competition Commission issue. Perhaps "Shameless" has the best connotations. The sequence of events: the transfer of the decision from the declaredly partial Vince Cable to the equally declaredly partial but in the other direction Jeremy Hunt, the Camerons at a dinner over Christmas with the News International chief executive,the promise that isn't worth tuppence of the editorial independence for Sky News, and now the shameless assurance that all correct procedures have been followed and all is well in the best of all possible worlds.
Clearly neither the BBC nor media plurality are safe in their hands.
This disdain for public opinion and promises augurs badly for the NHS.
Surely now is the time for Liberal Democrats in parliament to show their metal. I can't remember whether it was in a Laurel and Hardy or an Abbot and Costello film that I first heard the immortal phrase: "Even a worm will turn, just as a sausage will if you keep it long enough."
Here we have an explicit election promise of "no top down reorganisation,", an issue that is not in the coalition agreement, a proposal that is opposed by the overwhelming majority of the medical profession.
I earnestly hope that at our Spring Conference next week there will be such outrage that our people in parliament will be steeled to say "Enough is enough."
This is not a call for the end of the coalition. We are suffering for our own broken promise and betrayal of our economic and social principles, as the result of the Barnsley by-election shows. Surely we don't have to go along with a Tory broken promise as well, especially as it reveals rather than betrays their principles, which in the context of the NHS are the opposite of ours.
Clearly neither the BBC nor media plurality are safe in their hands.
This disdain for public opinion and promises augurs badly for the NHS.
Surely now is the time for Liberal Democrats in parliament to show their metal. I can't remember whether it was in a Laurel and Hardy or an Abbot and Costello film that I first heard the immortal phrase: "Even a worm will turn, just as a sausage will if you keep it long enough."
Here we have an explicit election promise of "no top down reorganisation,", an issue that is not in the coalition agreement, a proposal that is opposed by the overwhelming majority of the medical profession.
I earnestly hope that at our Spring Conference next week there will be such outrage that our people in parliament will be steeled to say "Enough is enough."
This is not a call for the end of the coalition. We are suffering for our own broken promise and betrayal of our economic and social principles, as the result of the Barnsley by-election shows. Surely we don't have to go along with a Tory broken promise as well, especially as it reveals rather than betrays their principles, which in the context of the NHS are the opposite of ours.
Thursday, 3 March 2011
Deficit hyper-uppers
In an article in the Observer last month William Keegan wrote:
"There is something barbaric about the way this coalition is setting about a deficit problem whose seriousness it has cynically magnified for its own political purposes."
Alas Liberal Democrats are in this deception up to the neck. In an "all member" issue of Liberal Democrat News which I have just received Nick Clegg begins his front-page article: "Tackling the legacy of Labour's debt is one of the most urgent tasks facing the government," continues "Labour left us well and truly in the red" and later cites "the deficit and debt left by Labour" as "the most obvious symptom of a much deeper economic malaise." On an inside page, in an article which could well have been written by Tory, Lorely Burt writes: "Our economy really is in a mess...You really can't underestimate how bad our debt situation is," and later, "(o)ur role as Liberal Democrats is to pick up the pieces... The first task is to reduce the deficit. By doing so , we can give confidence to businesses that they can invest in our economy without the worry of our becoming a financial basket case like Greece or Ireland."
Patiently in this blog I have tried to put the case that Britain’s debts are not historically high, that Labour’s expenditure was reasonably prudent up to 2008, the year of the crisis, and that the current deficit is a result of falling revenues arising from the recession rather than profligate expenditure. Above all, we are not Greece, are not and never have been in danger from “the markets,” who are, after all, largely institutions within our own economy , including many pension funds, lending to the our own government. The “savage cuts” are far from a matter of necessity but are ideologically driven. Liberal Democrats, as heirs to the party of Keynes and Beveridge, should be advocating pump priming rather than cuts. This case is supported by a group of distinguished economists and commentators , including including David Blanchflower, Martin Wolf, Joseph Stieglitz, and Paul Krugman.
Further support for this view appeared in yesterday's papers. No less than the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King was reported as placing blame for the deficit not on Labour's profligacy but on the city and financial sector, and regretting that "(t)the price of this financial crisis is being borne by people who absolutely did not cause it." A correspondent in the Guardian, Barry Krushner, gave devastating detail on the real state of the economy. His letter is worth quoting in full:
* The Guardian, Wednesday 2 March 2011
George Osborne dissimulates. He knows that Ed Balls is at odds with Labour party policy on cuts, knowing that we have 12 to 13 years to pay off debt and deficit. But he also knows that our level of debt (less than 60% of GDP net of bank assets) is within Maastricht Treaty limits (60%) and lower than almost all OECD countries; that this debt is low by historical standards (we sustained debt at more than 100% of GDP for 20 years up until the early 1970s); that debt repayments (less than 3% of GDP) are lower than they were under Thatcher (5.15%) and Major (3.8%); that our deficit is partly created by a low overall tax-take (around 36% compared with the EU average of 40%). He knows this because these are official statistics (available on Google - mostly Office for National Statistics but also ukpublicspending.co.uk).
He knows, therefore, that whereas our economy, dominated by manufacturing up to the early 1990s, delivered GDP growth of 2.5%, the financial sector since then has delivered growth rates of less than 1.5% – another element of structural deficit. He knows that, whereas public sector costs have risen year on year over the past 30 years, so has outsourcing to the private sector – currently at around 20% of total public sector resource. Though he may privately be content with Labour's failure to stem the concentration of wealth (the index of inequality rose under Labour – the Gini Coefficient up almost 5 points), Osbourne will be more circumspect that Labour borrowed less and repaid more debt than previous Conservative administrations (borrowing was roughly 50% less under Blair/Brown than it was under Major – more than twice Thatcher's debt repayments were made).
And his biggest dissimulation – under the continuing influence of the previous Labour administration, 2010 saw £20bn more than forecast wiped off the deficit as a result not of spending cuts but of "New Deal"-style growth stimulation. It is unremarkable that Osbourne can point to the OECD and IMF supporting cuts – they are the global advocates of public austerity. He does not mention the three Nobel prize-winning economists (Pissaredes, Stiglitz, Krugman) and Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, all of whom condemn this austerity policy as a serious historical error. Why not? Clearly because he wants no balanced public contestation over the sustainability of a public sector. The real question is why opposition parties and dissident Lib Dems allow this level of narrative control by the coalition government – "crisis", "unavoidable cuts", "Labour's fault". It's neither "middle" nor "muddle" nor an economic crisis – it's a crisis of democratic debate.
I have noticed that when, on BBC1's "Question Time" or Radio 4's "Any Questions," politicians "on message" quote the alleged "mess" left by Labour as a justification for current policies the audiences responds with a combination of a groan and a hiss. Apparently you can't fool all the people for too long a time. I hope that if these dissimulations are repeated at the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference next week they will be treated with similar derision.
A consequence of this hypocrisy as serious in the long run as the effects of the cuts on the quality of our society is the effect on the quality of our democracy. In the election we promised a new, more honest, politics. Distorting the record of the "last lot" is old politics, and we should be ashamed of using them, particularly as the deception serves not our, but the Tories', ideological ends.
"There is something barbaric about the way this coalition is setting about a deficit problem whose seriousness it has cynically magnified for its own political purposes."
Alas Liberal Democrats are in this deception up to the neck. In an "all member" issue of Liberal Democrat News which I have just received Nick Clegg begins his front-page article: "Tackling the legacy of Labour's debt is one of the most urgent tasks facing the government," continues "Labour left us well and truly in the red" and later cites "the deficit and debt left by Labour" as "the most obvious symptom of a much deeper economic malaise." On an inside page, in an article which could well have been written by Tory, Lorely Burt writes: "Our economy really is in a mess...You really can't underestimate how bad our debt situation is," and later, "(o)ur role as Liberal Democrats is to pick up the pieces... The first task is to reduce the deficit. By doing so , we can give confidence to businesses that they can invest in our economy without the worry of our becoming a financial basket case like Greece or Ireland."
Patiently in this blog I have tried to put the case that Britain’s debts are not historically high, that Labour’s expenditure was reasonably prudent up to 2008, the year of the crisis, and that the current deficit is a result of falling revenues arising from the recession rather than profligate expenditure. Above all, we are not Greece, are not and never have been in danger from “the markets,” who are, after all, largely institutions within our own economy , including many pension funds, lending to the our own government. The “savage cuts” are far from a matter of necessity but are ideologically driven. Liberal Democrats, as heirs to the party of Keynes and Beveridge, should be advocating pump priming rather than cuts. This case is supported by a group of distinguished economists and commentators , including including David Blanchflower, Martin Wolf, Joseph Stieglitz, and Paul Krugman.
Further support for this view appeared in yesterday's papers. No less than the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King was reported as placing blame for the deficit not on Labour's profligacy but on the city and financial sector, and regretting that "(t)the price of this financial crisis is being borne by people who absolutely did not cause it." A correspondent in the Guardian, Barry Krushner, gave devastating detail on the real state of the economy. His letter is worth quoting in full:
* The Guardian, Wednesday 2 March 2011
George Osborne dissimulates. He knows that Ed Balls is at odds with Labour party policy on cuts, knowing that we have 12 to 13 years to pay off debt and deficit. But he also knows that our level of debt (less than 60% of GDP net of bank assets) is within Maastricht Treaty limits (60%) and lower than almost all OECD countries; that this debt is low by historical standards (we sustained debt at more than 100% of GDP for 20 years up until the early 1970s); that debt repayments (less than 3% of GDP) are lower than they were under Thatcher (5.15%) and Major (3.8%); that our deficit is partly created by a low overall tax-take (around 36% compared with the EU average of 40%). He knows this because these are official statistics (available on Google - mostly Office for National Statistics but also ukpublicspending.co.uk).
He knows, therefore, that whereas our economy, dominated by manufacturing up to the early 1990s, delivered GDP growth of 2.5%, the financial sector since then has delivered growth rates of less than 1.5% – another element of structural deficit. He knows that, whereas public sector costs have risen year on year over the past 30 years, so has outsourcing to the private sector – currently at around 20% of total public sector resource. Though he may privately be content with Labour's failure to stem the concentration of wealth (the index of inequality rose under Labour – the Gini Coefficient up almost 5 points), Osbourne will be more circumspect that Labour borrowed less and repaid more debt than previous Conservative administrations (borrowing was roughly 50% less under Blair/Brown than it was under Major – more than twice Thatcher's debt repayments were made).
And his biggest dissimulation – under the continuing influence of the previous Labour administration, 2010 saw £20bn more than forecast wiped off the deficit as a result not of spending cuts but of "New Deal"-style growth stimulation. It is unremarkable that Osbourne can point to the OECD and IMF supporting cuts – they are the global advocates of public austerity. He does not mention the three Nobel prize-winning economists (Pissaredes, Stiglitz, Krugman) and Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, all of whom condemn this austerity policy as a serious historical error. Why not? Clearly because he wants no balanced public contestation over the sustainability of a public sector. The real question is why opposition parties and dissident Lib Dems allow this level of narrative control by the coalition government – "crisis", "unavoidable cuts", "Labour's fault". It's neither "middle" nor "muddle" nor an economic crisis – it's a crisis of democratic debate.
I have noticed that when, on BBC1's "Question Time" or Radio 4's "Any Questions," politicians "on message" quote the alleged "mess" left by Labour as a justification for current policies the audiences responds with a combination of a groan and a hiss. Apparently you can't fool all the people for too long a time. I hope that if these dissimulations are repeated at the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference next week they will be treated with similar derision.
A consequence of this hypocrisy as serious in the long run as the effects of the cuts on the quality of our society is the effect on the quality of our democracy. In the election we promised a new, more honest, politics. Distorting the record of the "last lot" is old politics, and we should be ashamed of using them, particularly as the deception serves not our, but the Tories', ideological ends.
Tuesday, 1 March 2011
Confessions of a Non Baby-Boomer
Baby-booomers are predicted to be in the news today, as the National Pensioners' Convention is to lobby parliament to point out that not all the retired are living the life of Riley by squandering their children's inheritance.
Having been born before rather than after the war I am not strictly speaking a baby-boomer but in many ways I feel I have had even better fortune than they. Of course the war years and those immediately following were austere, but I wasn't old enough to realise what I was missing and as no one I knew enjoyed the luxuries of "normal" life there was no one to compare with. Sweets were limited to 2oz of cleargums a week but I do not remember ever being seriously hungry or cold, except that boys in those days were expected to wear short pants up to the age of 12 or so,so we all experienced chapped knees and thighs during the winter, and the only remedy, "Snowfire" I think it was called, really wasn't much use.
When I reached the age of 11 secondary education was free and compulsory and all medical attention was free at the point of use. When I left school all higher education was free, along with maintenance provision and fares to and from home three times a year. When I eventually qualified as a teacher there was no difficulty in finding a job, nor even the necessity of elaborate applications (I did not become aware of CVs until I was almost thirty.) In teaching there was such a shortage that if you could hold the chalk and walk three paces without assistance you were in, and the same applied to most jobs. Those who found they had chosen the wrong occupation had no difficulty in leaving and training for another. Until the mid 1970s unemployment hovered between 200,000 and 250,000. When it began to creep towards half a million (whilst Michael Foot was Secretary of State for Employment) we wondered if society could survive.
Throughout my working career the question of redundancy never arose: I either stayed where I was or moved as the fancy took me. Then, to my great surprise, I was offered early retirement about 15 years before I expected it. The offer arose not, I think, from my incompetence, but from the fact that the effects on the birth rate of the introduction of the contraceptive pill in the 1960s meant that there weren't quite so many sixth formers around to teach, and Mrs Thatcher was threatening to rate-cap local authorities to force them to cut their expenditure. So I was surplus to requirements and could be jettisoned to meet the financial requirements.
I firmly believe that my generation is the most fortunate ever. I do not, however, believe that I have been or am a parasite on society. I paid for my pension throughout my working life, and the superannuation deduction was a significant portion of my salary, which was modest for most of the time. I also had the sense to "buy in" those years for which I'd missed making contributions whilst working abroad.
I do, however accept that my generation has been selfish. We have demanded, and largely received, "Scandinavian" levels of services but been prepared to tolerate only American levels of taxation to pay for them. The real problem has been a failure of political leadership. Throughout the second part of the 20th century all political parties have pandered to this illusion and none, not even the Liberals, has had the honesty and courage to say that if you want a civilised society you have to pay for it.
Alas today's dominant philosophy is to dismantle the welfare state I have enjoyed rather than fund it properly. Unless successfully challenged it is this philosophy which will rob our children of their inheritance.
Having been born before rather than after the war I am not strictly speaking a baby-boomer but in many ways I feel I have had even better fortune than they. Of course the war years and those immediately following were austere, but I wasn't old enough to realise what I was missing and as no one I knew enjoyed the luxuries of "normal" life there was no one to compare with. Sweets were limited to 2oz of cleargums a week but I do not remember ever being seriously hungry or cold, except that boys in those days were expected to wear short pants up to the age of 12 or so,so we all experienced chapped knees and thighs during the winter, and the only remedy, "Snowfire" I think it was called, really wasn't much use.
When I reached the age of 11 secondary education was free and compulsory and all medical attention was free at the point of use. When I left school all higher education was free, along with maintenance provision and fares to and from home three times a year. When I eventually qualified as a teacher there was no difficulty in finding a job, nor even the necessity of elaborate applications (I did not become aware of CVs until I was almost thirty.) In teaching there was such a shortage that if you could hold the chalk and walk three paces without assistance you were in, and the same applied to most jobs. Those who found they had chosen the wrong occupation had no difficulty in leaving and training for another. Until the mid 1970s unemployment hovered between 200,000 and 250,000. When it began to creep towards half a million (whilst Michael Foot was Secretary of State for Employment) we wondered if society could survive.
Throughout my working career the question of redundancy never arose: I either stayed where I was or moved as the fancy took me. Then, to my great surprise, I was offered early retirement about 15 years before I expected it. The offer arose not, I think, from my incompetence, but from the fact that the effects on the birth rate of the introduction of the contraceptive pill in the 1960s meant that there weren't quite so many sixth formers around to teach, and Mrs Thatcher was threatening to rate-cap local authorities to force them to cut their expenditure. So I was surplus to requirements and could be jettisoned to meet the financial requirements.
I firmly believe that my generation is the most fortunate ever. I do not, however, believe that I have been or am a parasite on society. I paid for my pension throughout my working life, and the superannuation deduction was a significant portion of my salary, which was modest for most of the time. I also had the sense to "buy in" those years for which I'd missed making contributions whilst working abroad.
I do, however accept that my generation has been selfish. We have demanded, and largely received, "Scandinavian" levels of services but been prepared to tolerate only American levels of taxation to pay for them. The real problem has been a failure of political leadership. Throughout the second part of the 20th century all political parties have pandered to this illusion and none, not even the Liberals, has had the honesty and courage to say that if you want a civilised society you have to pay for it.
Alas today's dominant philosophy is to dismantle the welfare state I have enjoyed rather than fund it properly. Unless successfully challenged it is this philosophy which will rob our children of their inheritance.
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