Tuesday, October 06, 2009
David Cameron retreats on raising retirement age
Mr Cameron insisted that he had only authorised a review into the issue. He claimed that 2016 was the earliest that changes would take effect and moved to ease the concerns of women, telling them that they would not be subjected to a sudden jump in their retirement age.
IMO: Perhaps he has finally realised that to raise the pension age for women in the 50s would lose him lots of votes. It seems to me that there must be two horns to any retirement policy, or any economic policy. The first is to get Broken Britain mended in the short term, the second to bear in mind longer term problems. We now know that in the forseeable future life expectancy may rise to over 200 years. Not many hard working people would want to support idlers for over 130 years. But a short term policy must bring in votes, and the idea of simply saying "there will be a review" really means "we want to be elected and will then do what we like". That is not a policy, Cameron seems already to have denied people the right to vote over the Lisbon agreement and he now seems to be using more weasel words than Tony Blair.
IMO: Perhaps he has finally realised that to raise the pension age for women in the 50s would lose him lots of votes. It seems to me that there must be two horns to any retirement policy, or any economic policy. The first is to get Broken Britain mended in the short term, the second to bear in mind longer term problems. We now know that in the forseeable future life expectancy may rise to over 200 years. Not many hard working people would want to support idlers for over 130 years. But a short term policy must bring in votes, and the idea of simply saying "there will be a review" really means "we want to be elected and will then do what we like". That is not a policy, Cameron seems already to have denied people the right to vote over the Lisbon agreement and he now seems to be using more weasel words than Tony Blair.
# posted by uv : 4:28 AM
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