This is the line that sticks in my throat.
People are expected to live, and also save for retirement on minimum or low wages?
Thats just ludicrous.
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And if youâre really lucky the government will relieve you of what little youâve saved to pay your care home costs.
Youâre better off pissing it up a wall.
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List of politicians who arenât tools:
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Major had an affair with Edwina Curry!
Yep.
And if youâve managed to buy a house, theyâll make you sell it to pay to be cared for.
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I donât know if you were around in the '80âs but this doesnât come close to what I experienced growing up, or, Iâm more or less certain, other young people at the time.
It was a truly fucking grim time to be young. Mass unemployment, YOP schemes paying subsistence wages, widespread poverty, AIDS, a heroin epedemic, the genuine fear of nuclear war, getting your head kicked in at a football matchâŚitâs like a garden party today in comparison.
The last thing young people were thinking about was providing for themselves in retirement. Most were on the dole.
The link youâve provided is totally irrelevant to those times. I may be wrong on this but I think pensioners were better off back then, I donât recall too many âeat or heatâ stories at that time. People saw the old age pension as an adequate means of getting by.
As for myself I touched lucky. After 4 years of casual work and unemployment I landed a job at the National Girobank (later A&L and Santander) in Bootle. Anyone who knows about it will understand what I mean when I say it was like winning the lottery.
But I vividly recall my induction day. There were 6 or 7 of us sat around a table as they went through the formalities, we got the chance to join the union, enter a penny-in-the-pound scheme, give to a charity etc, then almost as an afterthought we were told we could join the pension scheme. No hard sell, no attempt to explain the benefits of it, we all sat there staring at each other and mumbling about having fuck all left of our wages if we joined everything on offer. I canât remember how many joined it or didnât bother. Iâm glad to say I did.
The bottom line is, unless you were extremely lucky then you didnât have access to a decent pension fund, couldnât afford it or had a lot more things to worry about. The idea that people were more aware and intent on providing for themselves 40 or 50 years down the line is completely untrue.
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I understand your point but taking from pensioners isnât the answer. A ÂŁ6 a week rise is fucking derisory as things stand. The government tells us all the inflation rate is 2.8% or whatever in the previous 12 months, I donât know what fucking planet they are living on. My water bill alone has gone up 40% in the last year.
If you argue the rise should be the minimum of 2.5% all you are doing is condemning more and more OAPâs to living out their lives in poverty.
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Iâll bet no-one calling for the removal of triple lock, or whinging in general about what pensioners cost is going to be reliant on only a state pension when they retire.
The problem is Dane, only 92000 adults die in the UK each year before they can access their old age pension.
It freeâs up all the tax and NI theyâve paid all their lives, but the reality is not enough of these old cunts are dying.
The good news is that figure is expected to rise to 100k per annum by the time the retirement age reaches 67.
I agree with most of what you have written, but there were definitely cases of pensioners freezing to death at the time. Partly it was a knock on of having to go smokeless, as it was often a 3 bar electric fire or flued gas heater. The fuel costs were much higher than coal and the homes werenât insulated properly.
The YOP schemes came in during the early 1980s, and it replaced (badly) the apprenticeship system that had been in place. I donât know what your school was like, but the options for us were either the Army, some sort of higher/further education, or âschemesâ.
The only kids I knew that went into trades were people who had family members who would take them on. I particularly remember one year that Cammel Lairds were taking on some apprentices, I think it was about 15 places and 3000 applied for them.
Certainly, planning for retirement was bottom priority.
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Ours was an inner-city comp. (Alsop) and like you I donât remember any kids going into the traditional trades.
As I remember, one of my mates got a job as a carpet-fitter (he knew a family member who got him in), one started a YOP scheme driving a van for Ethel Austin and ended up being taken on by them and another went to Uni. A lad we knew became a submariner which sounded mad. I worked casual for the dole in Norris Green and spent some time on the dole before getting a job in the Girobank.
Suppose we were all lucky in a way, so many ended fucked up on drugs at the time.
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What about Terry Butcher?
That was her brother.
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i blame the governmentâs over the last 40+ yearsâŚ
theyâve got rid of all our heavy dirty industries like ship building and coal mining and replaced them with clean industries like semiconductor manufacturing,
then thereâs this smoking bans and drinking excess alcohol warnings,
no wonder people live longer,
bring back smoking, coal mining, bevying and ship building and the countries pensioner problem will be sorted in no time!
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Donât forget dodgy tins of salmonâŚ
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Health and Safety can F-off tooâŚ
scrap all regulationsâŚ
Anyone yearning for a return to the Good Ol Days should try reading Orwellâs Road To Wigan Pier.
For those already familiar with it , Iâm pretty sure the infamous Tripe Shop where he lodged was in Ashton-In-Makerfield.
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I thought they were the same person.
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Is that Woy?