James Kyle writes “with a heavy heart” against Labour’s treatment of pensioners, seeing the personal allowance threshold freeze as a betrayal that shows the Tories are more on the side of “those who have worked hard all their lives” (Letters, 12 April).
I’m no fan of Keir Starmer, but the suggestion that this is an anti-pensioner move is beyond credulity. Today’s pensioners benefited from numerous public goods that they also statistically voted against: publicly owned infrastructure; publicly funded university education; council housing and affordable private rents and house prices; robust workers’ rights; free movement across Europe.
They will have enjoyed care from the NHS and the school system, and could have gone to university, all free (ie paid for by the state); they could have got a council house, and bought it cheap, or bought a house privately, cheaply (and publicly subsidised), which will have ballooned in value because of state interventions. But some now imagine that it would be far fairer if young people pay more than they did to get less than they’ve got.
The triple lock is a unique protection of income against inflation that today’s pensioners enjoy while younger people don’t. The Tory “triple lock plus” would be even better for pensioners, as would giving them all £1m cash per week. But what about a concern for justice?
Many pensioners live in dire poverty, but many others live in relative luxury at the expense of those born later. They comfort themselves that their children will inherit the wealth they’ve accumulated, and sod the rest. Were we to abolish the injustice-preserving mechanism called “inheritance”, such people would, I suspect, take a very different attitude to this glaring intergenerational unfairness.
Dr Craig Reeves
Birkbeck, University of London
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