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Islington Tribune - by PETER GRUNER
Published: 5 September 2008

George Durack

Militant pensioners are set ‘to break windows’

ONE of the borough’s leading senior campaigners has warned that protesters could “break windows” in a militant action for a better pension.
George Durack, who chairs the Islington Pensioners’ Forum, said old folk were “sick of putting up with one of the lowest pensions in Europe”.
He spoke out after the Islington-based National Pensioners’ Convention claimed one in four elderly pensioners in the UK live below the poverty line of £151 a week.
Mr Durack said: “I suspect this time pensioners might start to get off their arses and throw bricks. I’m not talking about hurting anyone. But government windows could get broken by angry pensioners who have simply had enough.”
Mr Durack said a contingent of Islington pensioners and trade unionists will lobby Prime Minister Gordon Brown at the Labour Party conference in Manchester later this month.
Islington North MP Jeremy Corbyn will be holding a fringe meeting at conference to discuss the “pensioner crisis”.
Mr Durack said: “My impression is that pensioners in Islington are really struggling because of rises in food and fuel.
“Come winter and old folk will have to decide whether to heat or eat. Who would have thought we could have reached that situation under a Labour government.”
He suspected that the pension would again not be increased, but the government could use recession as an excuse.
“I think that a campaign of near civil disobedience might be the only way to get the government to listen.
“We would be doing this not just for today’s pensioners. But for those people soon to reach retirement age who will not have enough to live on.”
Dot Gibson vice-president of the National Pensioners’ Convention, said 62 per cent of pensioner couples get by on £10,000 or less each year but it looks like future generations will be even worse off.
She added: “It is a shocking indictment of the government’s pension policy that the number of older people in poverty is higher now than five years ago.
“The government has said it will restore the link between the state pension and earnings in 2012. But by then around three million pensioners will be dead and the pensioner’s purchasing power will have continued to fall.”

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