Heigh-Ho! heigh-ho! It's off to work we go. With a shovel and a pick and a rhubarb stick, heigh-ho! Heigh-ho! Heigh-ho! I loved that song. The little fellows in Disney's Snow White - happy workers dancing and singing of the joy of labour. Voltaire said: 'Work banishes those three great evils: boredom, vice and poverty.' Legacy of debt: Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling's reckless spending has crippled the nation's finances Tell that to British citizens who are now threatened by this government with having to work into their 70s before they get a pension. The coalition of politicians none of us particularly wanted to run the country seems to be led by a cry from Thessalonians in the Bible: 'If any would not work; neither shall he eat.' It boggles the mind, what ordinary people are having to put up with right now. First it was greedy bankers, with employees at all levels pocketing commissions and bonuses by selling loans to people who couldn't afford them. This meant that in the end we had to bail them out with money we had paid in taxes - money the bankers had no right to, which should have stayed in our pockets or at least been used to help the needy in society. Then it was those we elected to represent us blatantly, shamelessly stealing money from the people by fiddling their expenses on a grand scale. And when caught out, moaning and groaning as if they were the ones being unfairly treated, not their hard-working, honest constituents. Throw in the Labour government which borrowed money as if there were no tomorrow. Mismanaged the economy so grotesquely that we now face the biggest budget cuts the country's seen for 100 years. And top it off with a coalition full of politicians who stand to collect vast pensions from the state, saying the only way to balance the books is to cancel retirement. Greedy banker: Failure in the financial sector has left ordinary people picking up the tab To kill the hopes of those who want to step off the office treadmill and enjoy their old age. We are in the extraordinary position whereby elderly people - who've done as they were told by experts, be it bankers or governments, and saved over their working lives - are seeing those savings produce nothing to live on as interest rates vanish. They're having to live on capital - if they have any - and now their age bracket is being told they've got to go on working until they drop, to qualify for the pensions they've worked for all their lives. I'm fortunate because I'm rich. But that doesn't mean I don't understand how ordinary people are being hit. A year ago, I was getting £1.5 million in annual interest. Now, it's basically nothing. I never took out a pension because I never thought I'd need it. Like everyone else, to me the current financial turmoil appeared unthinkable. This is the result of one thing only: appalling government over the years by Labour and Tories alike. They used to say the idiot of the family went into the Church. For many years it has now been clear the idiot of the family went into either banking or parliament. David Cameron says he's going to forego his pension and some of his increase in salary. Big deal. Coming from a super-rich family, that's a choice he can afford to make. But there are millions of people who have no choice. They can only look on in amazement and misery at the ghastly future they face. A future of drudgery which is no fault of their own. The unfairness of it appalls me. Like everyone else, I can only hate the politicians and money men who brought this about. Don't tell me that's wrong, ungenerous of spirit, unworthy of a reasonable man. Faced with people who have done this country in, what else should anyone think? And what has happened to the bankers who oversaw this mountain of greed and stupidity? Are they paying a price? Not bloody likely! They' re counting their bonuses, driving their Rolls-Royces and 4x4s and rejoicing that they got away with it. I've known Ken Livingstone for decades. To say we are on different sides of the political divide is to put it mildly. But when he said he thought all bankers should be put up against a wall and shot, I felt like saying: 'Hand me the gun Ken. Let me be the first to pull the trigger.' I feel in much the same totally ungenerous spirit about the fiddling MPs. At the very start of the expenses scandal, I was on the BBC's Question Time with the usual rag-bag of members of Parliament, all spouting the party line like wind-up dolls. Eric Pickles MP, chairman of the Tory Party, admitted charging rent for a second home. He lived in his constituency, Brentwood and Ongar, 90 minutes from Parliament, and it was too far for him to travel. I got the biggest applause of the evening when I said to the audience: 'Let's have a moment of silence in sympathy for Eric Pickles having to travel 90 minutes to work each day.' As for the other two MPs on the Question Time panel that evening, both unsullied by the expenses furore, I said to them: 'Have either of you stood up in the House of Commons and condemned the fiddling of expenses? 'Have you, or any of your brethren, ever once considered it your duty to speak out against this abuse of power?' Predictably, they said nothing. With people like that leading us and bankers bankrupting us, is it surprising the populace feel both cynical and sickened when told they may have to work past their 70th birthday in order to get a pension. of course there are people, like me, who work because they want to. Retirement: Pensioners should be allowed to enjoy the autumn of their lives, having worked hard for 45 years I'm 75 this year. I've never stopped working. That's because the idea of golf sends me into spasms. It doesn't stop me understanding others who, having worked hard all their normal working life, look forward to the swing of the golf club, a winter cruise or simply gardening - uninterrupted by the need to work. The truth, I suspect, is that many people don't particularly like their jobs. They work to live. Then, understandably, it becomes tedium. Something to leave behind. When it's the moment to spend time with the children, the grandchildren, the wife. When you don't have to get up each day and join the weary throng, reporting in at 9am and leaving en masse at 6pm. It's all very well for little Disney cartoon people to leap about gleefully singing: 'Whistle while you work.' Right now, those looking forward to retirement can whistle all they like, it ain't gonna get them anywhere. You'll work until a government of public school boys who've never had jobs in the real world tells you to. Then, if you've still got the energy to spend it, you may get a pension. That's if the pension fund hasn't gone bust. or if the government hasn't decided you have to work until you're 80. Don't think that's impossible. The impossible today is commonplace tomorrow. As of 2009, the average age expectancy of a UK male is 76 years. A woman 82 years. Think about that. If men have to work until they're 70, some of them might just get six years of a pension. That leaves their widows with six years of nothing. Zero. Zilch. The husband's died. They won't have a large photo album of happy days spent with him in his retirement. They won't have a partner to share memories with. They'll have hardly any money. Is this really the 'caring society' I keep reading about?Why SHOULD you have to work until you drop just because greedy bankers
and corrupt MPs squandered Britain's wealth?
Sunday, 27 June 2010
Not the other way round. And even those who do enjoy their jobs only do so to a certain
age.
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