![]() Had to see doctor today 20th my blood sugars at 21.4 which means it’s going in the right direction, also had to jump on the scales and I’ve lost 8kg, actually I’m pleased with that, I’ve been signed off for 4 weeks because I have to get it under control and keep stressing about a job will exasperate my situation. Hi I’m 64 and 2 months I was made redundant on 24th april2019 but didn’t get redundancy pay as I had been there less than 2years, having to go to universal credit has been terrible and the strain of looking for work has seen my health take a nosedive, I think I’ve succumbed to stress and haven’t kept my diabetes in check, went to a walk in centreyesterday (((because when I rang the doctors on the 19th June I was given a appointment for 9th July))).where the triage nurse asked what was wrong, long story short glucose in my urine and my blood sugars were in the high20s, as I live alone I could be in serious trouble. ![]() That is why 50s women have been left in this situation today. There are many others who stood by and did nothing. The villains are the late Lady Thatcher, John Moore, Kenneth Clarke, Sir John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Steve Webb and Guy Opperman. Instead they chose the cheapest route – raise the pension age so they won’t have to subsidise the fund- but try and keep mum so the women wouldn’t realise what they were doing. They could have changed the rules and informed the Government Actuary Department that they would deliberately build up a surplus in the fund – so it could pay out as people lived longer without changing the pension age. In 1995 they knew all the arguments about people living longer and that money paid out in state pensions would go up. They decided the pain should fall on the electorate instead. ![]() They took the decision knowing that their Parliamentary and ministerial pension pot would mean they would be some of the wealthiest pensioners in the land when they came to retire. Why this didn’t happen is because politicians of all three major parties took a decision not to do this. This would pay more than three times over the money due to the women – and even allowed higher state pensions for everybody else now. I calculate – and this will be a conservative estimate – because it doesn’t count the reduced contributions post 1981 – that an amazing £271 billion yes billion extra would have been in the fund. We now know that virtually no money was paid into the fund by the Treasury for around 24 years from 1990 to 2014. As he says: “Restoring the supplement at its pre-1981 level would bring an extra £11.3 billion a year into the Fund, enough to meet the gross cost of a £109 per week basic pension.” His calculation from beyond the grave is that for every year that the government decided not to contribute to the fund it was deprived of £11.3 billion. There is an appreciation of him in The Guardian here. He sadly died, aged 85, in a car accident in 2014. The paper written 12 years ago by a man I personally knew as a fount of all knowledge on the benefit system when I was social services correspondent on the Guardian. ![]() Now thanks to an extraordinary paper prepared for the National Pensioners Convention by a social security expert Tony Lynes,and still on the web, I now know. What I did not know was how much money was lost. Recently I discovered that successive governments had taken a decision NOT to top up the fund as originally proposed by William Beveridge when the welfare state was set up in 1948. But the biggest argument against putting this right has been the cost – a fact perpetually used by the present pensions minister, Guy Oppenman, who quotes the £70 billion plus figure. The fact that 50s women were robbed of their pensions by raising the pension age is undeniable. Guy Opperman – the current pension minister who says it is too expensive to pay the 50s women. ![]()
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