Elderly people in the UK have been told to learn a lesson from the French, writes MARK HENNESSY
NEARLY A thousand pensioners holding banners, some clearly in poor health, thronged the meeting room in the Central Methodist Hall near the House of Commons yesterday, and they were in an angry mood, furious about changes that will eat into their pensions in coming years and cutbacks that will deprive them of services.
“Some say that we are a burden on society. Well, it’s time that we fought back. It was our parents and grandparents who fought for the welfare state. And we are not going back to the poverty of the 1930s,” declared Dot Gibson, the National Pensioners’ Convention’s general secretary, to thunderous applause.
For the pensioners, prime minister David Cameron and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg are already guilty of bad faith, despite their pledge to tie the state pension to inflation because they have chosen to use the consumer price index rather than the retail price index, which would see existing payments gradually eroded over time.
Services are already being cut by local authorities – day-care centres are being closed; meals-on-wheels services are being removed, while the budgets to pay wardens in sheltered housing are being pared. Worse will follow next year once the first tranche of cuts to local authority spending comes into force.
The declarations by the Conservative/Liberal Democrats’ coalition that other valued benefits, such as free bus passes and free TV licences for the over-75s cut little ice with the Central Methodist Hall crowd: “What’s the point of having a bus pass if the cuts to bus subsidies mean that you don’t have a bus?” asked the 76-year-old Gibson.
Rosemary Smith ( 68) came to the rally wearing a mask of Mr Cameron. She said: “Every time I look at his face, I think ‘how can someone like you possibly understand what life is like for many of us?’” Mrs Smith, who had travelled south from East Kilbride in Scotland, said: “Pensioners don’t want handouts, we want a decent pension and we want our dignity.” Demanding a £200-a-week (€229) state pension by 2015, Labour MP Kelvin Hopkins, who is himself a pensioner, warned that the situation will be even worse for the generation coming after them because many older people at least have some income from work pensions.
“The younger ones don’t. They face penury,” he said. Rejecting the argument that increases cannot be afforded, he said: “Governments can afford what they want to afford. They can afford wars and they can afford tax breaks for the rich. We have got a fight on our hands and I think that we have got to take a leaf out of the book of the French.” Again the audience applauded.
Southampton pensioner Robbie Robinson said the elderly in the UK have become frightened in recent months as talk about the spending cuts mounted: “If you see a pensioner in a supermarket they are the ones picking up goods and putting them down again because they can’t afford them. Then, you’ll see them looking for the out-of-date products because it is all that they can afford.
“They ignore us because we’re expensive, with free drugs and all of that, even though we paid for it during our working lives,” said Mr Robinson (66), who drove trucks throughout Europe. “My gran used to give a dozen eggs to the doctor when he came to our house because it was all that she had to give. Are we to go back to that? They all think that we are living on a fortune.”