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Residents of Belsize Park protest against post office closures last year
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Labour government failing to tackle age-old problems
Vulnerable pensioners are feeling increasingly left behind by the
modern world, writes Ken Savage
I AM an angry man. I know people who haven’t bought new underwear for 18 months, because they can’t afford it. If you follow an old person in the supermarket you’ll see them pick up a tin of beans, look at the price, and put it back on the shelf. They can’t afford to buy it. It’s tragic.
I’m comfortably off compared to many, but I’m an angry man.
The older generation are being left behind in this world of high-tech progress. The days of the envelope and postage stamp as a means for communication are fast running out. We no longer get a phone number to obtain details or further information – you are told to use the website.
Post offices have been closed by the thousands, giving the older person the choice of a further walk or to take a bus to their nearest one. But these are minor problems compared to the main concerns facing today’s elderly.
It is surely a scandal that in the world’s fourth-largest economy, the basic state pension is fourth from the bottom in Europe. The government, who set the poverty line at £128 a week, have the audacity to pay pensioners £87 a week, leaving more than two million in poverty.
In 1909, the year when the old-age pension first began, it was 25 per cent of the average wage. Today, it is just 15 per cent, and is falling year on year. It is my belief that by 2012, when the government plan to re-introduce the link between pensions and earnings, it will be just 10 per cent of the average wage.
What kind of a society is this that in the year 2007 we can allow a 103-year-old lady to be evicted from the Abbey Moor privately owned care home in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, because the owners say they need another £100 to meet the cost of her care?
Someone once said that you can judge any government by the way it takes care of the nation’s older people. Was it not Lady Margaret Thatcher who, when prime minister, said that the NHS was safe in her hands? The Baroness laid the foundation for the New Labour government of the Blairs and Browns embracing the private sector.
Privatisation remains high on the agenda of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government, who have over the past 10 years torn apart the social welfare and healthcare gains of the people, and in doing so have reduced the membership of the Labour Party to a disastrous low.
It is surely time to end the passive, blind loyalty to the attacks on the well-being of the common people, especially the pensioner.
Cuts imposed from the government filter down to the local authority, and how this Camden Council coalition of Tory and Lib Dems have seized the opportunity to impose the cuts.
The Greater London Pensioners Association, of which I am general secretary, no longer receives the meagre funding from this council administration – less than £5,000 – to pay the office rent.
This council have a reserve of £30 million, which they are saving for vote-catching at the next election. To deny us that meagre amount is bloody tight.
Their argument that we are a London-wide organisation, and therefore not entitled to council funding, is an excuse. Most of our work is done in Camden, and our newsletter is printed here.
Speed the day when principle, care and need, return to take precedence over the greed and gain of the commercial giants in the City of London’s richest square mile. Last year they clocked up £14 billion in bonus payouts.
There is a certain amount in the national cake, and if you slice off a huge chunk like that, of course there’s not enough for the rest of us.
And the pensioners, who are society’s most vulnerable, are suffering the most. Pensioners of 70 and 80, some in wheelchairs and some on sticks, don’t realise what is happening. They know something is not right, but they don’t know why.
That’s why I say to young people: join us and help wage the fight. It’s going to affect you more than us.
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