The WASPI Outrage Shows The Gerontocracy In Action
Why we shouldn't give the WASPIs anything
The WASPI (Women Against State Pension Inequality) brigade are coming for your wallets, and they won't stop until they've received billions in compensation for the terrible injustice of… having to plan their own retirements. They've got the wind in their sails after a report by the Parliamentary Ombudsman recommended each of the women affected get £1,000 to £2,950 in compensation over the Department for Work and Pensions' failure to adequately communicate the equalisation of the state pension age between men and women. Previously women were eligible 5 years earlier than their male peers.
The WASPIs want £10,000 each at a cost of £36 billion to the taxpayer. It's an election year, Labour are "looking into it," and the Tories, with their voter base of retirees, are on rocky ground. The media have given the issue wall-to-wall coverage. But this isn't a grave injustice getting some well-deserved time in the spotlight. Any compensation would reward a lack of personal responsibility not to mention being unjustifiable on fiscal grounds and deeply unfair to taxpayers.
The context here is vitally important. It was 1995 when the government set out plans to equalise the retirement age between men and women. The timetable was long, between 2010 and 2020, and the change was widely reported. It's true that in 2011, the Coalition brought forward the end of the equalisation timetable from 2020 to 2018, but this too was widely publicised in the press.
So we get to the WASPIs, a cohort of women born in the 1950s who were the first to be affected by this change in the retirement age. The campaigners' outrage centres on the speed at which the age was equalised and what they say was a failure on behalf of the government to communicate the change to the women who would be impacted. The press has had wall-to-wall accounts from WASPIs since the Ombudsman published its report.
There's the case of the woman who didn't know she wasn't eligible for the state pension and so… had to spend £20,000 taking a "big chunk out of a private pension pot" to "retrain in healthcare, including reiki" to earn an income until she hit 66. And the former headteacher who told Newsnight that she suffered two delays to her state pension without notice. As a former headteacher, she likely has a substantial public sector final salary pension, so it's puzzling why she needs to rely on the state. And there are plenty of jobs suitable for 60-year-olds that don't require spending thousands training in reiki, but I digress…
You might now be able to see what I'm getting at. The WASPI campaigners are, in large part, arguing that the state should compensate them because they didn't check whether they could afford to retire or not. Governments change policies, benefits, and entitlements all the time; they're reported in the press, and it's our responsibility to make sure we're engaged enough to know how those changes might affect us.
When the government lowered the threshold at which graduates had to repay student loans and hiked the interest rate, they didn't send a letter to every teenager in the country so they could plan accordingly. And nobody expected them to. So why are the WASPIs any different? These changes were announced a staggering 15 years before they started to impact anyone. 15 years!
And even if you were the type of person who assumed that it was the rest of the world's responsibility to make sure you know about your entitlements—rather than yours to, say, pick up a newspaper once in a while—surely you'd check before you retired, just to make sure that you knew the lay of the land before you made a massive decision. It's hard to feel sympathy with most of the WASPI stories; it simply seems like a case of people not taking responsibility for themselves and expecting others to foot the bill.
It's also ludicrous to suggest that giving £10,000 to every woman in that generational cohort is in any way a fair or reasonable use of taxpayers' money. Remember, we're talking about a generation where 1 in 4 are millionaires , whose hold on property ownership has seen their wealth skyrocket. There will be a very substantial portion of the WASPIs who simply do not need this money, yet they expect their children and grandchildren to pay for their lack of personal responsibility.
The state pension age keeps rising and will have to rise further as our population ages. We cannot set a precedent that people deserve compensation for changes in government benefits. A campaign run by any other generation built on such demands wouldn’t have gotten very far. The fact that the press is leading with the WASPI issue rather than the news that child poverty rates in the UK have soared to 3.6 million should tell you everything you need to know about who holds power and influence in Britain.
The WASPIs and their demands are the latest example of the gerontocracy in action. We shouldn’t put up with this misplaced sense of entitlement. For the sake of the nation, the government and opposition parties must hold firm and tell them no.
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