Not in my name

Cantilip

Yesterday I left the Labour Party and left them (Starmer, Reeves and UK Labour) a little love-letter on Twitter. It said this:

Culpable lacunae. Intellectually lazy. No attempt to have a rational debate grounded in fact. I have cancelled my subscription. I wish no part of you. First you ignore fact, no sirree, fact has no role in any debate of yours, then you whip the apparatchiks to back your corruption. The minimum wage is £11.44/hour. X 36 x 52 = £21415.70. It would seem reasonable to assume that this is regarded as the minimum people need to live on. The full new State Pension is £12155.50. Some people get the Basic pension, which is less. 35 years of NI are required for the full amount. Increases are pro rata. Pensioners’ housing broadly comes in 4 varieties. Own home outright; still paying mortgage; paying rent with savings, e.g. result of downsizing; paying rent made possible by Housing Benefit which may not cover the full amount. Housing Benefit is means-tested but not included among the list of qualifying benefits, which is bizarre. Even weirder, what are included are benefits for working-age people. How many pensioners are on Job Seekers Allowance?

There has been no attempt to explain the innately ludicrous decision to choose pensioners alone, deliberately singled out to be first to be sucked into this black hole of yours. No fact or argument whatever has been produced to demonstrate why other expenditure cannot be cut or income increased by taxation. The public has been treated with complete contempt, writ large in Reeves’ robotic repetition of the existence of the black hole as though there were only one possible way to start to fill it, ever more ridiculous supposed justifications for your behaviour, from the risible claim the economy would collapse to the farcical nonsense from Reynolds that you had no choice. Clearly the pair of you take us all for fools, to be thrown any old nonsense.

I can profile the first death on your hands. He or she is much like my mum was in her later years, housebound, totally incapable of filling in a form or getting on the phone, for whom the Internet might as well not exist, desperately needing heat because of her medical condition, a dear old lady who never did anyone any harm and notably a couple of times did good, when as a good Labour lass she confronted the Blackshirts in the East End, and when she worked in London throughout the Blitz. She had me. Others in their 80s and 90s have no-one.

Some pensioners have mobility problems. This means we cannot take a quick run round the block to keep warm. Your friends in the energy companies whom you are protecting from filling the black hole ought to be pleased about that. It means our energy bills are above average. It also means some are housebound. People at home 24/7 have higher bills than those who go out to work. The point about this is that it is screamingly obvious. Not only did you not perform an impact assessment you are clearly unforgivably ignorant of the fact that some medical conditions cause people to feel unnaturally cold, as of the fact that some people need electricity for medical equipment. 90-year-olds have been discussed and dismissed as though fit young people of 20 by disgusting fools.

More fun facts. Pensioners are those who were running the country when Reeves was in nappies, those who taught the pair of you from primary school to postgraduate, who cleaned the windows, made the laptops, diagnosed the illnesses, drove the school buses, designed the buildings, who made your lives possible. It is now someone else’s turn. Were a miracle drug to be invented, such that age and infirmity did not take their toll, all more recent generations would be out of work and require support by the state. I do assure you that would cost a great deal more than pensioners. Puh-lease less of it about hard-working people carrying us, because ‘hard-working people’ wouldn’t have an existence were it not for those who have gone before.