The Hung Like a Donkey General Election December 2019 Thread

[Davkaus]

6 minutes ago, snowychap said:

If that's a reference back to the conversation other day then it's misplaced (as it wasn't about 'abusive language').

Ha, I even edited my post to avoid using the same word so I didn't drag you in to it. 

[snowychap]

45 minutes ago, Davkaus said:

Ha, I even edited my post to avoid using the same word so I didn't drag you in to it. 

Sorry.

[bickster]

3 hours ago, PompeyVillan said:

Absolutely not. It was global banking crisis. 

Triggered by sub prime mortgage defaults in America. The bankers got greedy and lent too much money to too many people who couldn't afford it. Markets crashed very quickly, essentially everyone wanted their money back all at once. 

But yeh, the Tories made it out as if Labour were responsible. So many people believed them and the media were complict in enforcing the lie. Labour were weak at defending themselves on the issue.

The Tories got elected along with the Lib Dems and decided that rather than deal with the real villains in the financial sector, they decided to punish the poor and disabled, and those that rely heavily on the state. The bedroom tax and cuts to disability benefits have been particularly damaging.

But really they punished everyone because they have cut funding to schools, police, NHS, libraries, prisons, fire fighting, etc all public services to terminally low levels.

Now they're throwing a few crumbs to public services and expect us all to be thankful. 

 

This of course doesn't mention that there should have been more robust regulation in the UK financial sector, which may have just put the blocks on the UKs exposure to such sub-prime lending.

Blair and particularly Brown were responsible for the extreme lack of regulation in this sector, it was Brown that essentially took the FSA to the dentist and pulled all its teeth out.

But having said that, I'd have fully expected the Tories to exactly the same

[snowychap]

 

[HanoiVillan]

 

[peterms]

 

[blandy]

15 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

Taking the pensions from those women was at best a breach of contract and in my opinion, theft.

Swinson voted for it with her tory chums and has already criticised Labour’s plan to compensate the victims. People are beginning to see through the nice wing of the tory party.

I’m a little ignorant of the details. I had it in mind that the old pension law, giving men a pension at 65 and women at 60 was found discriminatory against men. Whichever government it was then said, OK, we need to be fair to both sexes, 65 for both, then. It would have been nice if they’d said 60 for both, but tbh I’m not sure I totally get how a terrible injustice has been done to these women. I understand how it feels, to an extent, to have something you thought you’d be given delayed, but what am I missing here?

[chrisp65]

1 hour ago, blandy said:

I’m a little ignorant of the details. I had it in mind that the old pension law, giving men a pension at 65 and women at 60 was found discriminatory against men. Whichever government it was then said, OK, we need to be fair to both sexes, 65 for both, then. It would have been nice if they’d said 60 for both, but tbh I’m not sure I totally get how a terrible injustice has been done to these women. I understand how it feels, to an extent, to have something you thought you’d be given delayed, but what am I missing here?

It was hung on a discrimination case, but they acted retrospectively against women that had been in the old system for 50 years. An utter scam of a way of complying with a new interpretation of law. No genuine legal need to do it just a convenient half excuse to get some money off a minority group not exactly famous for their militantism.

[peterms]

 

[bickster]

2 hours ago, blandy said:

I’m a little ignorant of the details. I had it in mind that the old pension law, giving men a pension at 65 and women at 60 was found discriminatory against men. Whichever government it was then said, OK, we need to be fair to both sexes, 65 for both, then. It would have been nice if they’d said 60 for both, but tbh I’m not sure I totally get how a terrible injustice has been done to these women. I understand how it feels, to an extent, to have something you thought you’d be given delayed, but what am I missing here?

I think their argument is that it happened just like that without warning, so they weren't able to prepare financially. Having worked all their life with a retirement goal of 60, suddenly they were 5 years away from retiring and being able to claim state pension, which left them with a massive shortfall of money. I may not be completely right though

[chrisp65]

That's exactly it, remembering this is a group of workers not famous for their high salaries. People that have budgeted for a lifetime to have a reasonable retirement, suddenly told the rules of the game have changed and you'll get no pension for five years you budgeted for.

Imagine all the MP's being told in year 4 of their term in office that yes, the job is 5 years long, but we've just changed the rules so you only get pay for the first 4.

It would be less impactful obviously, not many of those women would have been on £70k plus expenses, they'd have been on a lifetime of more modest, potentially low part time wages. But I'm not sure MP's would judge that as entirely fair if it was done to them. Retrospective changing of the rules right at the end of a contract. From the people that tell you they are the financially responsible trustworthy party.

Not cool.

[blandy]

29 minutes ago, bickster said:

I think their argument is that it happened just like that without warning, so they weren't able to prepare financially. Having worked all their life with a retirement goal of 60, suddenly they were 5 years away from retiring and being able to claim state pension, which left them with a massive shortfall of money. I may not be completely right though

 

14 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

...this is a group of workers not famous for their high salaries. People that have budgeted for a lifetime to have a reasonable retirement, suddenly told the rules of the game have changed and you'll get no pension for five years you budgeted for.... Retrospective changing of the rules right at the end of a contract. From the people that tell you they are the financially responsible trustworthy party.

Thanks both. So is it only working people, or former working people affected? I mean if someone was a housewife, or single for 60 years, they're not affected?

I thought people who worked got pensions from their employment and that's a different set of finances?

I'm assuming it's all women, regardless of whether they ever worked or not and it's the state pension, not employment pension. I also see that many of them will not have big pots of money saved up to tide them over. So these women are in effect the first to be affected by the change in retirement age brought about by the previous arrangements being illegal. I can see that they're miffed, as I would be - I think the retirement age has been changed again, since - I was told I have to work till 67, where it was previously 65, for example. It stinks on a personal level.

I guess I'm wondering how the change from 60 to 65 can be brought in without anyone getting affected? I mean it can't, can it? As I said earlier, perhaps a preferable way would be to have reduced the male pension age to 60, rather than increase the female one. That way no-one suffers.

[peterms]

3 hours ago, blandy said:

I understand how it feels, to an extent, to have something you thought you’d be given delayed, but what am I missing here?

To call it having something you thought you'd be given delayed is rather to understate the issue.

People have been given to understand that they would get the pension at 60.  Now they won't.  3.8m women are affected.  How much they lose depends on things like when they were born, but some lose up to £50k.  For some, there may be an option of continuing in employment.  For many, there won't.  The outcome for many will be hardship and poverty, for a situation not of their making.

The justification is that differential pension ages is discriminatory.  The decision to deal with that by penalising millions of people who did not create the discrimination is morally unacceptable.

People rely on this pension.  It's not like a prospective bonus which they now won't get, it's the core income on which most of them will depend.

On top of that, they have been told for many years that we pay into the system via NI, and we get back the advertised benefits.  The fact that the internal workings of government finances don't quite work that way isn't the point - there is an expectation that has been created, and the breach of this expectation is a breach of a type of contract between rulers and ruled.  It is a betrayal of the worst kind.

[Davkaus]

37 minutes ago, blandy said:

 

I guess I'm wondering how the change from 60 to 65 can be brought in without anyone getting affected? I mean it can't, can it? As I said earlier, perhaps a preferable way would be to have reduced the male pension age to 60, rather than increase the female one. That way no-one suffers.

It's always going to affect people a group of people in that cutover age, it's true, but typically what is done is changing it decades in advance. That's what has happened with us with the age increasing from 65 to 67.it sucks, but we have decades to plan for it. These people found out a few years in advance that their state pension was being pushed back 5 years, which is somewhat more difficult to plan for. 

Edit :it'll be at least 68 for me actually, but that changes in the mid 2040s.

Edited November 25, 2019 by Davkaus

[HanoiVillan]

I told this story over the summer, I'm sure, but to tell it again: I was working closely with a lady this summer who was one of those affected by the pension age changes. She had hoped to retire, but didn't have enough savings. She was working while in remission from cancer, struggle with the pace of work despite being obviously knowledgeable and competent at the job, and while we were walking together at one point she just collapsed on the floor. There was a huge human cost to that decision, and I don't think we should underestimate how unfair it was. 

[welnik]

46 minutes ago, peterms said:

To call it having something you thought you'd be given delayed is rather to understate the issue.

People have been given to understand that they would get the pension at 60.  Now they won't.  3.8m women are affected.  How much they lose depends on things like when they were born, but some lose up to £50k.  For some, there may be an option of continuing in employment.  For many, there won't.  The outcome for many will be hardship and poverty, for a situation not of their making.

The justification is that differential pension ages is discriminatory.  The decision to deal with that by penalising millions of people who did not create the discrimination is morally unacceptable.

People rely on this pension.  It's not like a prospective bonus which they now won't get, it's the core income on which most of them will depend.

On top of that, they have been told for many years that we pay into the system via NI, and we get back the advertised benefits.  The fact that the internal workings of government finances don't quite work that way isn't the point - there is an expectation that has been created, and the breach of this expectation is a breach of a type of contract between rulers and ruled.  It is a betrayal of the worst kind.

I'm doing more and more work for people in their late eighties and early nineties. Do you think that they have paid enough N. I to cover the cost of their pensions? One of my customers was 93, he retired at 55 on an indexed linked pension. His contribution would have lasted a couple of years. Who has been funding his lifestyle since? 

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

22 hours ago, HanoiVillan said:

as huge numbers of economists pointed out at the time.

Hindsight economics is easy,  if 1 of these economists had predicted the economical collapse and the government had acted on it even with 5 hours notice I suspect the UK  would be rich,  amazingly enough they didn't.

Just becasue they point things out doesn't mean they know or are sure what would happen is all I am saying.  I mean ffs,  everyone knew it was going to fall over except the governments at the time.

 

 

[PompeyVillan]

The WAPSI policy is perhaps quite clever from Labour. It may help them convert just a few from the older demographic from blue to red. Those sorts of votes are worth double. That along with some potential new voters could be important in key marginals. 

It's also the right thing to do. 

[bickster]

1 minute ago, PompeyVillan said:

The WAPSI policy

Is it in the manifesto then?

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

1 minute ago, PompeyVillan said:

from blue to red.

They certainly seem to be turning the heat up if nothing else.

Just in time by the sounds of it.