In the autumn of 1999 Tony Blair was attending the opening of a nursery when he was confronted by an elderly woman holding a sign. The sign was an early expression of a view many people would come to hold over the following decade. It read: “Blair, you are a c***”.
The reason this “typical sweet granny”, as Blair remembers her in his memoir, My Journey, was annoyed was that under his government, the state pension was due to rise by the rate of inflation, which had just hit its lowest point in 36 years (1.1 per cent); the result was that the sweet grannies were going to get an extra 75p per week, which they thought was stingy (even though it was the same increase in their spending power they’d had in previous years). The encounter led to Blair’s well-known observation that “Your average Rottweiler on speed can be a lot more amiable than a pensioner wronged, or, to put it more accurately, believing they are wronged.”
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Subscribe here to comment“This would save vast amounts of money”: it would be helpful, and more convincing to give a figure so that we could put it in context with the £146 billion.
I hate sweeping generalisations based on a single characteristic. I’m a pensioner with a good income who is ready and willing to get less and give more, provided we have a humane social security system for those of all ages who need it.
I recall being told by a Treasury official that a reason governments of all stamps have never made an effort to explain to people that NI is just a jobs tax and that the money is spent immediately, not saved up for your future pension, is that the common misperception makes people less unwilling to pay it. The sort of thing that bites you in the end, if true.