Cameron recently spewed out a load of sickly syrup about how the Tories will take care of pensioners. Triple lock protection, and all that crap, but what is in the pipeline doesn't look quite as comforting to that army of elderly who retire and want to enjoy their life as they live longer. Already the murmurings from the back room Tory planners is all about “encouraging” elderly to work longer. They see a group that is receiving money and not working, and they could be another regiment of free workfare for their corporate buddies. Of course it will all be done with the smoke and mirrors of the illusion that pensioners really want to work until they drop dead. The state propaganda machine will see that, slowly, slowly, the tide will be turned, and those pensioners that want to enjoy their retirement in doing things they like doing, will be cast in the role of scrounger, taking tax payers money and not contributing to society.
I worked all my life and when I retired it was probably the richest period of my life. At last I had some control over my life, I could come and go as I pleased. Though not much money I could get on with lots of ideas I had put on the “back-burner” for years. If somebody had come along and suggested that I should get into some sort of training for a new job, I would probably have strangled them. I hope the present and future pensioners will think similarly. Retired people don't want to work until the drop, they just want a decent pension, which they have paid for, by helping create the wealth of this country, and then left to get on with their lives as they see fit.
Read the full article HERE:It is important to point out that Altmann talks about encouraging people to work longer or take up an apprenticeship, not forcing them. They are not yet that confident. But this is exactly the kind of smiley faced rhetoric that was eventually used to justify workfare and benefit cuts for sick and disabled people. Altmann even proposes an Age Confident campaign, modelled on the DWP’s current Disability Confident initiative, the shoddy PR programme introduced to provide soft cover for cutting disabled people’s benefits.
Workfare for your pension may be some way off but that is no reason to be complacent. Reports like this are how it begins. Encouraging people to work longer is presented as helping them, or ending age discrimination. Liberals will cheer, the Labour Party will applaud. Charities for older people will start thinking about all those juicy contracts to train pensioners in how to write a CV that might be on the way. Middle-class professionals, who earn more in an hour than some do in a day, will think it’s just common sense to do a few hours work after you retire – as long as the money’s right of course. And slowly those who choose to retire at 65 will be start to be criticised for not taking up all the exciting opportunites now available to work for the minimum wage until the day you die.
