Janet Street-Porter embodies this country’s pensioner problem
Where on earth does Loose Women’s Janet Street-Porter get the idea Rishi Sunak ‘hates pensioners’? The entire Conservative agenda is built around appeasing this entitled generation and the rest of us are paying for it, says Sam Bidwell
The fable of The Scorpion and The Frog tells the story of a scorpion who wants to cross a river, and so asks a frog to carry it across. The frog is hesitant at first, fearing that the scorpion will sting him – but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it did so. Yet, lo and behold, when the pair are midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, condemning them both. Despite its self-interest in keeping the frog alive, the scorpion cannot resist the temptation to sting – it is simply in his nature.
As I watched Loose Women’s Janet Street-Porter castigate a visibly uncomfortable Rishi Sunak for “hating pensioners” on Tuesday, I couldn’t help but wonder if the fable ought instead to be called The Pensioner and The Politician. Despite attempts by successive Governments to turn the UK into a retirement home with an aircraft carrier, many of Britain’s ageing baby boomers are still intent on bashing the Conservative Party. The ‘grey vote’ has benefitted handily from 14 years of Tory rule, and yet can’t resist an opportunity to grumble.
That’s despite April’s record-breaking 8.5 per cent increase to the state pension, which will see all pensioners get an additional £900 a year, regardless of wealth. Apropos of nothing, about a quarter of British pensioners are millionaires.
Since the triple lock was introduced by the Conservatives in 2011/12, the cost of the state pension has increased by £78bn – all paid for, of course, through more borrowing and higher taxes on working-age people. Then there are the free bus passes, the winter fuel allowance, the free prescriptions, and the planning system that gives outsized weight to the opinions of elderly Nimbys.
All bought and paid for? Hardly. The average person born in 1956 will receive £291,000 more from the state than they paid into the system across their lifetime. In fact, today’s pensioners are simply the beneficiaries of Britain’s 20th century boom years. Despite post-war difficulties, the 1980s and 1990s saw Britain achieve unprecedented prosperity, the result of deliberate policy decisions and global economic factors. The stars aligned just as baby boomers were at the peak of their careers.
Yet today’s working-age voters are being squeezed by a historically high tax burden, soaring housing costs, and sluggish wage growth. The prosperity that baby boomers like Janet Street-Porter enjoyed is a mere fantasy for many young people today. Efforts to leverage even more of the state’s resources towards the engorged coffers of rich pensioners are only making it more difficult to deliver the economic renaissance that this country badly needs. Is it any wonder that so many young people today are sceptical about capitalism’s ability to improve their lives?
There is a political lesson in all of this. As it turns out, building an electoral coalition around a single, entitled demographic is a dangerous thing; choosing a demographic reliant on ever-growing state subsidy is downright suicidal. As the Tory Party regroups after the election, it should remember the lesson of Janet Street-Porter. Whatever promises you make, however much funding you deliver, some pensioners will simply never be satisfied. Maybe it’s time to try speaking to those squeezed working-age voters instead. As Edmund Burke once said, the arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.
Sam Bidwell is director the Next Generation Centre at the Adam Smith Institute