I suspect he knows “the olds” won’t vote for him and they’ve been feted and mollycoddled for the last 14 years so he’s focusing his attention on younger voters.
Would you say the Tories have done so badly the next election is Starmer’s to lose rather than having to win it?
Good luck with halving consultants and having a different staffing policy.
The best get paid more than civil service pay and you need the best if you want to succeed.
It’s finding an alternative solution because otherwise most pensioners can’t significantly increase their income in response to inflation, except by down sizing , which isn’t always an option. Some form of index linking is increasingly important because today one might possibly live for another thirty years after retirement
I’m fortunate in that my two other pensions are index linked, but most people aren’t so lucky. Similarly because UK inflation as been higher than that in France my spending power has at least theoretically increased.
I totally agree but the current system has pensions marching ahead of every other form of income in pretty much every circumstance, while the young get screwed left, right and centre.
Don’t disagree with your points, but the answer isn’t to screw pensioners.
Even if they can get p/t jobs which constricts the labour market, most older people can’t work as hard as they once could. I’m 71 and fairly fit, butn can no loger spend six hour gardening or do a thirty km hike - my limit without training is now half that.
Mortgage rates are still nowhere near the 15% I paid.
Auto enrolment pensions have been in place 12 years now - currently a marvellous 8% of workers’s salary is by law invested for them each year, earning compound interest or growth for up to 30-40 years. That % is going up soon. It’s absolutely marvellous. Even the Tories would have to work to take that away and I doubt they could.
Today’s pensioners have many who defo didn’t get that. The British pension relative to the cost of living in the UK was 29th in the world, ISTR seeing 2 or 3 years ago. With all the other industrialized Western countries at or ahead of 18th place or so at their lowest. Then a big gap with some dodgy countries before the UK at 29th.
I think it’s dropped to a lower placing than 29th now too. The strategy to try to improve that was called the triple lock but was expected to be a slow catchup but actually it may have fallen behind.
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I’m not sure that’s what I suggested.
I don’t disagree and actually paid more at one point and briefly, a scary 24% in South Africa But OTOH UK house prices are now crazy.
Re pensions: all my pensions are index-linked but that’s not the case for most people. Fortunately we can live well even though we’re largely living on only one person’s pensions.
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True.
But house prices were a much smaller multiple of average salary back then - 15% would be utterly infeasible today.
People have always borrowed as much as they were able too, up to and sometimes slightly beyond what they can manage. In many ways, the actual start price of the house makes no difference if you can get a deposit together and then keep up your repayments then the situation isn’t substantially changed. I’d like to have seen a legal cap on mortgages longer than 25 years and borrowing more than 2.5 X joint salary, but that ship sailed a long time ago.
I had that too, but fortunately it wasn’t in the long term, was it?
It was bad enough though and the rates were still high and we were managed that on one salary.
IIRC ours peaked at 17% although it was temporary in the sense all rates are temporary unless fixed.
We borrowed 2.5 + 1 x salaries for our first 1 bed maisonette and just about got the £17,100 we needed with our deposit for the £18,000 purchase price. The only time we really struggled was after we had children and moved from cheap London to expensive Oxfordshire where cost of living was very high.
Salaries were lower then too Billy. Proportionately it’s not much different today.
I remember being grateful to pay only 8% for a brief period.
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It is hugely different. The house price to income ratio is hugely higher than it was when rates hit 15% such that around 6 or 7% would be similar today.
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It is, that’s the point.
I see @JohnH has already posted some references.
If you go back far enough then of course.
Why didn’t you go back to the 50’s?
I too am envious of those who bought in the 1970’s and before. I bought later and still got clobbered with high interest rates struggling to pay mortgage on a salary people would find derisory today. Nor did I get the house value increases much over what I had purchased for, that those in earlier decades had the benefit of.
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Back on subject,wouldn,t it be easier if the UK just admitted that they made a massive mistake and started negociations to rejoin the EU,instead of having to make u-turns all the time,it is becoming tedious.
Undoubtedly - but we’re not there yet. In fact I’m not sure we will ever really admit that it was a mistake, nor for that matter do I think we will ever rejoin - though I actually hope that I am wrong on that score. Time will tell - ask me in five years.
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