A letter to the Taxpayers' Alliance

The Taxpayers' Alliance is a right-wing group with whom, most of the time, I disagree politically, but I do find their tales of woe and waste highly amusing. I don't donate to them. Today I received a letter from them telling me that they have a new campaign manager, Mr Harry Fone, and he wants me to write and tell him which campaigns I think the Taxpayers' Alliance ought to conduct. Here is my reply.

Thanks for writing.

Thank you for inviting me to suggest campaigns which the Taxpayers' Alliance should become involved in. There are many such campaigns, as Britain is in a desperate state thanks to completely incompetent management, but the most urgent ones I can think of are

(a) Double the old age pension, all social security benefits and the income-tax-free allowance. Make the bosses live on the average full time wage paid to their workers. This will at a stroke (remember that?) end the recession, which is caused by government meanness and a greedy and selfish toff class, and has nothing to do with debts or productivity.

(b) Ban all imports from China. Quite apart from deliberately collaborating with a foreign government that is trying to destroy the British economy by exporting goods below cost price, this will more or less eliminate the imports of the products of child labour, forced labour, convict labour and slave labour. No Chinese goods work properly and all of them fall to bits after a couple of weeks of normal use. A ban on Chinese imports would also stimulate the manufacture of British goods of quality.

(c) Requisition all unoccupied houses, second and subsequent homes, investment properties, buy to lets and illegal sub-lets and sell them to homeless families for £10.

(d) Re-nationalise the railways without compensation, slash fares to one tenth of their present levels, abolish second class, fix the toilets, bring back the restaurant cars and line the seats up with the windows.

(e) Hang criminal motorists if they kill or endanger life. If they were drunk at the time, hang them twice.

(f) Abolish the Royal Family except for one monarch, one monarch's consort, and one heir and trainee. Move homeless families into the Royal Family's mansions and palaces except for one palace in London and one in Scotland. All the rest of the sponging toffs should either get a job or claim the standard rate of social security like everybody else has to.

(g) Bring back the full student grant sufficient to pay tuition charges, accommodation, books, equipment, food and fares, as it was not all that long ago. Do away with the (imaginary or actual) need for billions of foreign speaking immigrants who have skills that British kids can't afford to learn any more.

(h) Abolish the Conservative Party. They do no good of any kind so why should we put up with them? Abolish the Labour Party as well because it's the same as the Conservative Party.

(i) Abolish the European Union. The Europeans should learn English and then apply, and pay a huge fee, to join the British Empire. (I owe this obvious idea to David Frost and Anthony Jay.)

Best wishes and thank you again for giving me this opportunity. I hope to see you making the case for all the above within the next week or two.

Sincerely, Ken Johnson

The sort of pension I want you to get

What do we want?
Free pensions equal to the average wage!
When do we want it?
At age 60!
Pensions are, briefly, in the news again. It is a pity that there are so many distractions to be seen and heard, because old age pensions are one of the most important provisions that a country can make for the people who live in it. One forgets that before the Old Age Pension Act of 1908, people too old or weak to work expected to find themselves in the work-house until the day they died. The workhouses, incidentally did not finally close until 1930. I often have the feeling that some of our sillier politicians pine for the chance to bring back the workhouse.
This week the Daily Mail reported that the Office if Budget Responsibility believes that the pensionable age might rise again, this time to seventy five years.
There seem to me to be three basic objections to that proposal.
Firstly, the present government, though it appears less like a sort of political Keystone Cops than its predecessor, tries to justify its every act of meanness by claiming that ‘austerity’ has made it necessary. You get the feeling that if the United States said they only invaded Iraq because of austerity, everybody in Britain would have accepted their excuse. Usually the government claim that ‘we are all living longer,’ and therefore they cannot pay pensions as generously as before. Nonetheless they continue to spend our money on nuclear weapons, a high speed railway from nowhere to Birmingham, sending advice to Civil Servants not to take cakes into the office and a high maintenance multitude of wastrel Royalty. And while all that goes on, pensioners in the United Kingdom are paid less than almost any other pensioners in western Europe. Sometimes I get really annoyed when the government tells me what I have to put up with instead of understanding that I put them where they are, I pay them, and if I don't want them to boss me around they should damn well stop it.
If you look at the numbers, you can see that this purported justification is false. We are not living longer. The age at which the oldest people die has not changed. Life expectancy has not changed in a hundred years. Life expectancy at birth has increased because babies no longer die in infancy and women no longer die in childbirth. But life expectancy at age 18 has scarcely increased at all, except for people stopping smoking and surviving cancer for longer than once they did. That’s important, because it is at the age of 18 that you start to save for your pension. The number of years during which you will pay pension contributions and the number of years for which you will live on your pension are about the same as ever.
Secondly, unemployment is massive and shows no sign of diminishing. Don't believe the old wives’ tales about unemployment falling or about employment increasing. Neither is true. The figures are more fiddled than Paganini's violin. The terrible fact is that unless things change a lot, and quickly, many people now in their twenties will reach the age of sixty five having never had a paid, full time job with proper wages. By the time they come to claim their old age pension they will have a derisory National Insurance contribution record.
Thirdly, many workers, certainly including me, are not going to be fit enough to continue working long past their sixty fifth birthday. With massive unemployment meaning that every job is filled immediately, often by a friend or relation of a manager, and with the Job Centres reduced to advertising vacancies which are wholly imaginary, many skilled workers will find themselves begging or, worse, scraping a living on Social Security.
I have no clear vision of what ought to happen — obviously it ought to involve giant corporations paying their taxes and government not wasting money on endless computer systems that don't work and wouldn't have made a blind bit of difference to anybody if they had — and nobody cares what I think anyway. I do propose a goal: a distant landmark, if you like, towards which we can all march on our bath chairs and walking sticks and zimmer frames, holding our banners as high as our arthritis allows. It is: Free pensions, paid at age 60, equal in value to the average wage of full time employed persons in the United Kingdom. The government can afford it, and don't let them tell you otherwise. They just don't want to.
If we know where we want to go, there is a small chance that eventually, and once the Revolution has overthrown the old order, we will get there.

17 February 2017. If you agree with me, please sign my on line E-Petition to Parliament about pension reform. You must be a British citizen or a UK resident to sign it. It's here: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/185661/sponsors/yOLF7ucjsGAChNvzYHq.

27 December 2017. It's been pointed out to me that the life expectancy statistics have another odd property that I had failed to notice. You cannot extrapolate from them.

Life expectancy at birth has increased because children no longer die in infancy. Although it has taken some time to stop children dying in infancy, the process is now complete. There are, to all intents and purposes, no more deaths in infancy to stop. There will be no further increase in life expectancy due to the end of infant mortality.

Likewise women of childbearing age do not die in childbirth any more. There are, therefore, no more deaths of women in childbirth to be stopped.

Deaths due to lung cancer are, in many cases, caused by smoking. An almost universal habit in the 1960s, smoking has pretty much dried up now. There are many fewer premature deaths from lung cancer, so only a small further fall in deaths from lung cancer is possible.

What does this mean for pensions? It means that although these three important causes of death have been pretty much eliminated, the corresponding increase in life expectancy cannot continue. This means that, even if you consider the rise in life expectancy since 1917, you cannot extrapolate from it to predict the life expectancy of an 18 year old worker born today. In other words there is no reason to suppose that the increases in life expectancy due to the elimination of death in infancy, death in childbirth and death due to smoking will continue. There is, in other words, no reason to expect life expectancy at age 18 to be much greater in sixty-five years' time than it is now. The government is telling untruths about life expectancy in an attempt to cut taxes for themselves and their toff chums.

3 May 2019. The State pension does not actually work by accruing your weekly contributions into an account in your name. Instead, as is widely known, today's State pensions are paid out of yesterday’s National Insurance contributions. That means that it would be possible to, say, double that part of the National Insurance contributions that pays for State pensions, thereby making the increased State pension more self-financing than would have been possible in a pension scheme based on savings accounts. Since National Insurance provides a substantially higher return on investment than the pension savings schemes offered by the Banks, nobody should have qualms about stopping their payments into the savings schemes offered by the Banks and putting that same money into increased National Insurance.

Which only leaves the question of why two apparently sane political parties agreed to pay a hopelessly inadequate State pension and hand a nice little earner to the Banks.