Tory Pension Plans: A Tale of Two Cities

Article published: Friday, October 9th 2009

At the Conservative Party conference yesterday David Cameron and George Osborne announced, to much fanfare over their honesty, that they would raise the male retirement age to 66 in 2016, a decade earlier than under current plans. While it seems common sense to respond to what looks like a demographic time-bomb with the addition of only a year’s extra work, the local breakdown of the numbers reveals a fundamental inequality which is ironic considering the city in which they made the announcement. The difference in life expectancy between rich and poor areas in the country means that both male and female Mancunians can expect to die ten years earlier than those in Kensington and Chelsea or six years earlier than those in West Oxfordshire, which includes David Cameron’s constituency.

Discussing average life expectancy in national terms is therefore something of a smokescreen. Not only is the Tory figure of an average national life expectancy of 86 incorrect according to figures from the Office for National Statistics, who put it at 77 for men and 81 for women, but it is not a quirk of fate that some of us live longer than others: it is closely related to factors such as income, education, the local environment and the jobs on offer.

Unsurprisingly, the areas with high life expectancy are often affluent, corresponding to parliamentary constituencies held by Tories. Macclesfield has a male life expectancy of 79 and has been a Conservative seat since 1918, while a short journey away the safe (Hazel Blears notwithstanding) Labour seat of Salford has a male life expectancy of 74. On the wider scale, there is the North and South divide: Dorset is increasingly becoming the nest of London commuters and the retired wealthy, while parts of Manchester or Glasgow still suffer from thirty years of industrial decline and unemployment. It is not then a coincidence that East Dorset has the third highest expectancy at 81, whereas central Glasgow has the lowest, with 70. Nor is it hard to guess who represents each.

This is not to say that a vote for Labour is a vote against the plans, since the age was already set to be raised in 2026. A Labour vote is therefore only a strategy for those who will be 65 in the decade after 2016, but as we’ve discovered over the years voting Labour is not an activity to be encouraged, even among consenting adults. The issue is rather the fact that what looks like a necessary idea that has to happen sometime soon is flawed when basic underlying inequalities are not being addressed.

A year is a very big deal if you retire with seven years left to live, in the case of Manchester, or as few as four years in the case of Glasgow. It is even worse as many employers encourage older workers to leave even before 65, or for someone willing to work but simply not physically able, a problem that can begin well before 60. It also means that people who work full-time from their teens could well spend between 20 and 25 years not working, while those with higher incomes, in education until their twenties and living in more affluent areas could well see out 30 to 35 years of no full-time work. This divide means the proposals will affect not just the ill or those encouraged to take early retirement, but the poor more than the rich.

The Tories’ slogan this conference has been “we’re in this together”, with Cameron and Osborne repeating it like children who have learned new swearwords. But the raising of the pension age will not affect the Tory heartlands in the same way it will affect the poorer and poorest parts of Britain. For all their rebranding, they remain true to the traditions of their creed, and for that reason a more accurate slogan would be “we’re all in this together – until the rest of you die”.

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Comments

1. Great article!

   All the cuts being proposed at the moment are crazy. If you want to reduce a budget deficit, there are lots of different wasy of doing it – making sure major corporations don’t tax dodge as much as they do now should be the main focus (see http://www.taxjustice.net), and the rich are still very much under-taxed compared to many European countries. Also, as I beleive Will Hutton pointed out, the budget deficit is smaller now than in the glory year’s of the british empire.

   This is an ideological move, an act of class war – the neoliberals are using the crisis as a chance to attack the public sector and using the budget deficit to justify it.

   A very, very similar thing happened in most third world contries in the 1980s under the structural adjustment programs, and it led to decades of economic stagnation, but a massive boost for transnational corporations and wealthy national elites.

   We’ll see how this one pans out…

   Comment by lou on October 11, 2009 at 8:49 pm

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