UK Government and Its State Pensioners

UK State pensioners should be forgiven for not understanding their treatment by the present UK Government. The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, often states he is coming from the moral high ground, for example as he said in a speech to the Labour Party conference on 23 September 2008.

What angers me and inspires me to act is when people are treated unfairly.  So when people share with me stories about the hard time they’re having with bills, I want to help, because I was brought up seeing my parents having to juggle their budget like the rest of us.

However we now have a story in the Telegraph that Adults could be forced to take out private insurance to cover nursing home costs.  This is to cover the cost of their care in old age under plans being considered by the Government.

This stands in sharp contrast to the views expressed in a recent blog post by Michael Thompson of Link-Age/Countrywide.

What makes matters much worse is not just the national apathy on this issue from both richer pensioners with other income, from the general public, from the British media, and from the the two major political parties in this country.

It is that the money is there, with this Government sitting on a National Insurance “surplus” of around £40 billion*, which is expected to be 74.1 billion by 2012.  And also that the Government’s Pension Credit Means Test system is costing tax payers 10 times more than the restoration of the earnings link.

To think that our war veterans and younger pensioners are means tested for extra money on a £90 odd quid a week state pension makes me puke, when MP’s themselves are sitting pretty thank you.  Still we British largely do nothing.  We get what we deserve in this country, but our pensioners do not.

It would appear that seniors in the UK do not get the respect they deserve.

* Update: Peter Morris in a comment to another post offered the following information:
Some time ago I received a response under FOI from the UK Government’s Debt Management Office which holds the surplus in the National Insurance Fund in an investment account called “Call Notice Deposits” and the balance was around £50 billion as at 31st March 2008.