Of Pensionable Age

The non-story of the week has to be the pension projection and its non-too subtle accompanying scare message. Most of those who won’t qualify for the full state pension in the relatively near future will be those who have made insufficient contributions for one reason or another, often because they were unaware of the need, sometimes through part-time working, or working only until they could afford not to, supported by a partner. The lifetime unemployed need not panic of course; their ‘stamp’ is full paid up... by you. 

But the bit that kept being headlined was the prediction that three quarters of people currently in their twenties will lose out on around £19,000 over the course of their retirement. Firstly, given that they are expected to live to a hundred and therefore spend about 30 years in retirement that amounts to around £12 a week in today’s money. But, secondly, will there even be such a thing as a state pension by the time they retire?

The parlous state of the country’s finances – successive governments paying for bread and circuses with borrowed money - suggests the universal state pension may be on borrowed time. Anybody who has the means and foresight will not rely on future state provision, besides, isn’t it about to become compulsory to be enrolled in a company pension scheme? If the government is truly serious about retirement planning it should stop taking National Insurance contributions as current income and let workers divert that directly into their own future. We’d be able to fund fewer maternity units, sure, but babies are so last year.

But we're talking another 50 years here. Nobody knows what the world will look like post-June 23^rd. Will people even retire in the way we think of it today? They could have cured death by then. We might even, finally, have sorted out those hover boards. To expect what is increasingly looking like a failed socialist big-state welfare model to survive until then is fanciful. To rely on it is bordering on lunacy; we’ve only had any form of state pension for around a century and it used to be a pittance that few lived long enough to claim.

A child of the nineteen-fifties could expect to go into a job their grandfather would recognise. A child of the twenty-teens could easily end up in employment that their nineteen-nineties parents may not even be able to comprehend. We have come through the astonishing revelation that you could even make a fortune by being Jade Goody – thanks for that, Max Clifford – to a world where children can become millionaires by simply having an idea. A penny for your thoughts has become reality for some.

When I was in my late twenties the internet was still a decade away, ‘white European’ wasn’t a derided racist minority and most people worked at a place, with colleagues, for a boss; the idea of working from home was for a very few lucky people with quite special skillsets. Now it is possible to telework, for machines, with virtually no direct human interaction at all – this suits a surprisingly high number of people, who would far rather work at a screen than have to deal with pesky people all day long. How this freelance work-hopping would provide a company pension is hard to see.  

If you don't look after the pennies, the government will.

But what is perhaps easier to image is a world where you squirrel away your savings, out of the reach of governments and deny them the access to funding via plundered tax and national insurance. You decide how you spend now and what you save for your future. No wonder the government want to scare you about pensions in a future they have no control over – they must be absolutely shitting themselves.

If you're gonna do it, do it right

Thursday; polling day: a day for observing a respectful non-partisan silence as the Scots go to vote, not least because at least half of them will be hung over to buggery. Let’s chat quietly among ourselves for a while. But, oh, it still has to be about Scotland for, in this article in the Express Alex Salmond continues to peddle the fundamental lie about immigration; the one that is constantly used to suppress dissent in every country affected by recent mass influxes of unskilled labour, that “…the country will need another XX,000 immigrants a year to fill jobs and fund a welfare system for its ageing population.”

Charles Ponzi’s name became associated in the 1920s with the deliberate practice of attracting new investors to pay dividends on earlier investments, instead of paying those dividends out of earned profits.  From Wikipedia: “The promoter sells shares to investors by taking advantage of a lack of investor knowledge or competence, or using claims of a proprietary investment strategy which must be kept secret to ensure a competitive edge.” That is the British pension system in a nutshell.

And then we get the EU pushing the same lies, dressed up as admonishment for our unruly disregard for the socialist master plan: All the time it’s “immigration is good, it is always good, it has nothing but goodness oozing for every pore… repeat after us, immigration is good…” The rabid muslim murderers of the Middle East repeat “god is good” with every slice of their beheading blades, wearing the same glazed-over, unthinking expressions of hatred for all things civilised, for all things British. It’s time to get a few things straight:

There is no shortage of labour – in fact it’s Capital-L-Labour that is the problem – as for skills gaps, that is due to successive education departments not having the balls to front up to and kick the arse out of political correctness. Every single low-skilled worker that enters Britain is a direct cost to the country; even if he – or increasingly she - doesn’t displace a resident drone, their tax take is piffling, their spend minimal and their cultural contribution is insignificant; ‘diversity’ is part of the same scam.

Every single viable British worker displaced by immigration is a net cost to the country which takes upwards of ten ordinary taxpayers to cover. So, what, the solution is to import ten foreign workers for every Brit on the dole? And what OF the pension scam? As the population ages, do we keep on increasing exponentially the number of migrant workers so the Ponzi becomes a Pyramid? It’s political pass the parcel-bomb with the problems being handed off, administration by administration and every party hoping they aren’t left holding when the music stops.

Balanced migration is good. A stable population with the right demographic mix is good. Opening the floodgates, putting out to grass an indigenous population you don’t give a fuck about, swamping whole towns and cities with insoluble tensions, branding every whistle-blower as a racist, fomenting unrest, degrading everybody’s amenity and selling it as the only way to maintain pensions is a crock of shit and if the politicians don’t know this, they are unqualified for post.

Alex Salmond - The Ponz?

Of course, if they DO know this then hanging may be too good for them. So, while I hope Scotland makes the ‘right’ decision, whatever that turns out to be, I dearly hope they are not intending to rely on the lie that immigration is any kind of a solution. If you are going to be independent and proud, do it properly.

Any old iron

Sitting at my desk I can hear bird song. Bird song and the assorted rattles and coughs of the bin men and neighbours stumbling into the day. Bird song and bin men and - hark!- what's that? I am transported back to my youth when, for a few bits of scrap, the Rag and Bone Man would hand over a balloon. Heaven only knows what he did with our offerings, but he and his horse seemed happy enough to plod through the day, collecting other people's junk. Noble scavengers, recycling our rubbish aeons before it became fashionable, politically correct and environmentally unsound.

Nowadays several 'scrappies' come round every day, not once, not twice, but - it seems - all bloody day long! Not content with a dobbin and cart they patrol the streets with a loud-hailer and a tuneless "Scrap-eye-earn" on an endless, amplified loop. No balloons either - turn your back for five minutes and anything metallic disappears into the cavernous maw of their truck: unwanted tat, discarded tools, old cookers, garden gates, drain covers, railway track, signal cable... you name it, they can sell it on for cash through a network of illegal, under the radar, scrap merchants.

Where there's muck there's brass and if you don't keep your eye on your belongings they won't belong to you much longer. It's not beyond the crafty tinkers to employ diversionary tactics either; while one knocks at your front door, another is in the back garden, hunting down anything of value to flog off. Which is much the same as the government appears to be doing this week...

Reduced to scavenging the diminishing national savings pile for any scrap of worth, the squabbling over [probably] unconstitutional Lords reform is diverting attention away from the rich pickings in your back yard. Just when you've finished pouring money into the pot and picked up the meagre pension you've paid for all your life. Just when you thought you had nothing of value to give away, look what they've found behind the greenhouse. Nick Boles wants to means-test the little extras that make life bearable for many senior citizens.

Of course, 'means-testing' doesn't mean that such small comforts will be taken away entirely from those who most need them. Yet. But it's a step on the way. As individuals learn the state can not be trusted to spend our taxes wisely - giving away a fortune to Europe, welfare dependency and NHS bureaucracy - those who are able will protect what they've got, while the rest will see their pitiful belongings scavenged by the rag and bone man of socialism, to recycle into votes.

Isn't it time to stand up to those who want to put the British virtues of thrift and fair play on the scrap heap? Do we really want it to be every man for himself? At this rate we'll all be saddling up Hercules and hitting the streets. (Baggsy I get to be Albert!)