Hard cases make bad law. On the other hand this is a one-off and no precedent would be created if the ladies were compensated; millions of ***VOTERS*** would be appeased and that’s the only important factor in economic policy innit.
DocBud
As we know, courts regard parliament as sovereign
She’s having a laugh.
Hallowed Be
“Many left school at 14 and 15 to work in hard manual jobs that took a toll on their health”
to even write that as a sentance without a nod to the 63 year old men still bloody doing it.
Rob
“Many left school at 14 and 15 to work in hard manual jobs that took a toll on their health”
There’s that equality again. Oh well.
Excavator Man
She truly is a stupid woman. I had to wait until I was 65 to get my measly state pension, whereas a woman born on the same day as I, and who had worked the same number of years making the same NI payments (which many of them wouldn’t have) would have got theirs at 60. That’s 5 years at around £6k a year, or nearly £30k*, I was underpaid when there wasn’t equality.
Not only that, but as on average, women live longer than men, she would go on drawing it longer.
Ovaries to that, I say!
*OK, so state pension is paid gross, but taxed via one’s tax code so that as a higher rate taxpayer I’d have lost 40% of it, but it’s still getting on for £18k. And present value, because going back in time the state pension was lower, but it’s relative value higher, and we might need a well-known economist to calculate it for us.
F*ck those 60+ year old women, as Wayne Rooney might say.
Steve
Excavator Man – Lol
Jim
“Hard cases make bad law. On the other hand this is a one-off and no precedent would be created if the ladies were compensated”
Surely if this bunch of women get to cry ‘Equality means I get more!’, whats to stop the women born a few years later claiming exactly the same thing in a few years time? After all anyone who reached maturity before the change in the law could argue they’d been promised a pension at 60 when starting work and paying NI and thus were due one.
If stupidity and failure to investigate ones own financial affairs is going to be the criteria for giving out free money then there’ll never be an end to it….
Gamecock
‘These older, poorer women’s lives were very different from younger women now.’
Whah! Whah! Them damn kids today got it made!
Note the argumentum ad passiones. ‘Poorer’ serves no other purpose.
MyBurningEars
@DocBud
If the Tories win a big majority at the next election then I have the slight suspicion we will be hearing less about how great it is that parliament is sovereign.
Andrew C
What do we want?
– Equality!
When do we want it?
– when it suits us.
Chris Miller
@Jim
So if the government takes an extra £50k from your bank account, you’d simply say “It was my own fault – I should have seen that coming”?
Nobody is arguing against the equalisation of pension ages – it’s the abrupt and harsh way it was implemented that is the problem.
Andrew C
@Chris Miller “it’s the abrupt and harsh way it was implemented that is the problem.”
Abruptly notified by the 1995 reforms.
Slightly accelerated by the 2011 changes.
‘abrupt & harsh’ would have been making the changes immediately and overnight in 1995.
Andrew C
A 18 year old woman having had a child in 1991 and another in 2007 would by now, by dint of being entitled to receive child benefit, have accrued 28/35 of a full state pension, even if she’d not worked a single day and lived off benefits throughout that time.
Pretty good return on £0 NIC paid.
Van_Patten
Excavator Man wins the thread
Might be a bit harsh to say she’s possibly the only commentator who is similarly prolific (I’m disregarding some of the newer Guardianistas Tim has pointed out on here who only have less than a dozen articles) to Owen Jones and Richard Murphy and is more stupid but it’s the equivalent of medieval scholastic arguments over the number of angels on a pin head. All are irredeemably idiotic and need to be the among the first three recipients of the 25% Socialist tax on all assets which will follow abolition of the secret ballot….
DocBud
Baby boomers are bad, but only when they are men.
Jim
“So if the government takes an extra £50k from your bank account, you’d simply say “It was my own fault – I should have seen that coming”?”
As I think I said before on another thread about this, does your argument apply to taxes that go up as well? We could well have a Labour government in the not too distant future that wants to put top rate taxes up to 70-80%, which will happen overnight. Do the people thus affected get to demand some sort of special treatment? A rise of 20 points in the top rate could easily cost someone 20k/yr in taxes, so maybe 100k over a 5 year Parliament. What comeback do they have?
Rob
‘These older, poorer women’s lives were very different from younger women now.’
If Polly hadn’t enthusiastically supported for decades a State spending money like a pissed-up sailor with a bounty who has just hit port after two years without leave, in fact consistently criticising it for not spending enough, then it is possible we could have had a society where women, and men, received the State Pension at 60.
Rob
A small part of Arts spending could probably pay for this.
A small part of the Overseas Aid budget very probably would.
Perhaps the surplus we give the EU would cover it?
Opportunity cost, Polly. You spend it all on something else.
MC
As the most recommended comment on the Graun article points out, for decades women enjoyed retiring earlier and also living longer, giving them a vastly better return on their NI than men.
Any complaints about inequality then?
All this bullshit about fairness boils down to “more for meeee!”
BraveFart
The intellectual and moral contortions that these leftie fvckers can manage in support of their spurious arguments is truly more impressive than the twisting of octopuses.
Many tax changes are introduced immediately, sometimes with retroactive effect and can undo careful plans made in good faith with potentially catastrophic effects.
Smithy
My wife’s view: ‘If only the feminists had kept their traps shut I’d be getting a pension at 60.’
Jim
“My wife’s view: ‘If only the feminists had kept their traps shut I’d be getting a pension at 60.’”
I doubt it. The sums dictate otherwise, and while the changes are being hung on the ‘equality between the sexes’ peg, they would have come regardless, the status quo was utterly unaffordable. Hence why pension ages weren’t equalised in the middle – it was about getting the figure up to save the Treasury £££.
Jim
I’m heartened that even in the Guardian the comments saying ‘The poor women deserve more £££!’ are getting a good kicking……..
Stonyground
Why would you complain about inequality when it was unequal in your favour, wouldn’t it make more sense to keep quiet about it? Maybe you are some kind of moral purist who thinks that all inequality is evil, even when it is in your favour. But then to complain about it when the playing field has been levelled really does make no sense.
Edward Lud
In 1989, my father warned me, aged 18 as I then was, not to expect a state pension.
Hasn’t happened yet. But I’ve no doubt he was broadly correct. The money will just run out. If it’s not me, it’ll be my daughter. Or her children.
Too many something-for-nothing-ers.
I appreciated then the unfairness of being required to contribute to something in the mere nominal expectation of it paying out. And, worse than that, paying the debts of those who’d gone before, who hadn’t troubled to work out how their freebies would be paid for.
My conclusion then and at all points since? Government is crap, and there does not seem to be a whole lot one can do about it. It’s not a sexism thing. It’s a crapism thing. Done on a government-wide scale, it’s, colour me amazed, crap and impoverishing.
And don’t get me started on private schemes, aka, Chancellor’s fluffers.
Atlas shrugs.
Edward Lud
Unless you’re in the public sector, obvs. Or umbillically connected to it. Oliver Robbins, yes, you, Robbins. You toady, you cretin. I’m looking at you, and your Ilk.
Pcar
Many left school at 14 and 15 to work in hard manual jobs that took a toll on their health
Doing what “hard manual jobs” – bin women, off-shore fisher woman, sewage pipe clearer, roofer, brickie, scaffolder? School dinners more likely
These older, poorer women’s lives were very different from younger women now.
Yet Guardian keep telling us tthe young are suffering, can’t buy a house, can’t afford rent, massive student loans blah whine
@Hallowed Be @Excavator Man @Jim @Rob @Andrew C
+1
@Chris Miller
-1
Andrew C
“These older, poorer women’s lives were very different from younger women now.”
What are we talking about here? Women born in the 1590s? Oh, wait, it’s the 1950s actually.
Entering adult life in the 70s. It wasn’t THAT bad.
FFS, those ‘poor’ women had it a fuck sight easier than their mothers.
john77
@ Pcar
Not if you were born in the 1950s – school leaving age wasn’t fourteen, And women born in the 1950s didn’t work in hard manual jobs – only men did.
Polly doesn’t know what she is talking about (surprise?). I was born in 1946 and school-leaving age was 15 for my generation.
On Monday my wife and I walked over along a disused railway track to the next town but one and as we approached a railway viaduct met and chatted to a steam-engine enthusiast, found that he and I were the same age and he asked if I could remember the wage for my first job – which I could: £6 a week and he responded with £2 1s 6d!! I knew that I and the other two were paid “over the odds” but I hadn’t realised the extent. [While I was recovering from the shock my wife explained that my first job was as a computer programmer so there was some reason for the higher wage.]
Even adjusting for inflation my state pension is more than double his starting wage. On my way back I found him shovelling stable manure. Polly thinks (no, not thinks: complains) that women are being treated unfairly because they can only retire when 8+ years younger than this guy who is still working manually. Let her shovel manure if she wants equality.
Bloke in Callao
Let her shovel manure…
She may not shovel it John77, but she spouts it right enough, all over the pages of the bloody Guardian.
Jim
” But then to complain about it when the playing field has been levelled really does make no sense.”
It makes sense if you’re utterly self absorbed, and are incapable of seeing anything other than your own self interest. Hang on, who is it complaining again……..ah, women………..makes sense………..
Bloke in North Dorset
Pcar,
Doing what “hard manual jobs” – bin women, off-shore fisher woman, sewage pipe clearer, roofer, brickie, scaffolder? School dinners more likely
I think I’ve mentioned it here, Heather Heying (eveolutionary biologist & Mrs Brett Weinstein see Evergreen State College idiocy that drove them out) made a point that most women weren’t really bothered about job equality until the ’70s when it became obvious that jobs were moving in to the office and becoming physically easier.
Bloke in North Dorset
The really issue here is that the pension age for both sexes isn’t heading towards 80 or even higher given current life expectancy. It might mean some other form of social security for manual labourers but most people in our service economy have fairly easy work.
As an aside, I’m sure I read or heard that Nye Bevan originally proposed the state pension as being fully funded by NI, but when the rest of the cabinet realised what this meant they overruled him.
jgh
“These older, poorer women, won’t have the same money as men!!!”
If they’re poor women, too poor to pay all the NICs, then they’ll get pension credits to top up their pension to a full NIC pension. Oh, wait, you mean those “poor” women who don’t qualify for pension top-up because they’re too not-poor to get them.
Ted S, Catskill Mtns, NY, USA
Entering adult life in the 70s. It wasn’t THAT bad.
I was under the impression that adult life in the 70s was that bad thanks to the Callaghan government.
john77
@ Ted S
Wilson became PM in 1974 – so it depends *when* in the 1970s.
Pcar
@Ted
Margaret Thatcher became PM in 1979 and fixed broken Britain
TDK
“…women’s pension age has been raised, to 65 last year, to 66 next year, giving many no chance to build up a pension.”
Let me rephrase that: “…women’s pension age has been raised, to 65 last year, to 66 next year, giving women an extra 5-6 years to build up a pension.”
Hard cases make bad law. On the other hand this is a one-off and no precedent would be created if the ladies were compensated; millions of ***VOTERS*** would be appeased and that’s the only important factor in economic policy innit.
As we know, courts regard parliament as sovereign
She’s having a laugh.
“Many left school at 14 and 15 to work in hard manual jobs that took a toll on their health”
to even write that as a sentance without a nod to the 63 year old men still bloody doing it.
“Many left school at 14 and 15 to work in hard manual jobs that took a toll on their health”
There’s that equality again. Oh well.
She truly is a stupid woman. I had to wait until I was 65 to get my measly state pension, whereas a woman born on the same day as I, and who had worked the same number of years making the same NI payments (which many of them wouldn’t have) would have got theirs at 60. That’s 5 years at around £6k a year, or nearly £30k*, I was underpaid when there wasn’t equality.
Not only that, but as on average, women live longer than men, she would go on drawing it longer.
Ovaries to that, I say!
*OK, so state pension is paid gross, but taxed via one’s tax code so that as a higher rate taxpayer I’d have lost 40% of it, but it’s still getting on for £18k. And present value, because going back in time the state pension was lower, but it’s relative value higher, and we might need a well-known economist to calculate it for us.
F*ck those 60+ year old women, as Wayne Rooney might say.
Excavator Man – Lol
“Hard cases make bad law. On the other hand this is a one-off and no precedent would be created if the ladies were compensated”
Surely if this bunch of women get to cry ‘Equality means I get more!’, whats to stop the women born a few years later claiming exactly the same thing in a few years time? After all anyone who reached maturity before the change in the law could argue they’d been promised a pension at 60 when starting work and paying NI and thus were due one.
If stupidity and failure to investigate ones own financial affairs is going to be the criteria for giving out free money then there’ll never be an end to it….
‘These older, poorer women’s lives were very different from younger women now.’
Whah! Whah! Them damn kids today got it made!
Note the argumentum ad passiones. ‘Poorer’ serves no other purpose.
@DocBud
If the Tories win a big majority at the next election then I have the slight suspicion we will be hearing less about how great it is that parliament is sovereign.
What do we want?
– Equality!
When do we want it?
– when it suits us.
@Jim
So if the government takes an extra £50k from your bank account, you’d simply say “It was my own fault – I should have seen that coming”?
Nobody is arguing against the equalisation of pension ages – it’s the abrupt and harsh way it was implemented that is the problem.
@Chris Miller “it’s the abrupt and harsh way it was implemented that is the problem.”
Abruptly notified by the 1995 reforms.
Slightly accelerated by the 2011 changes.
‘abrupt & harsh’ would have been making the changes immediately and overnight in 1995.
A 18 year old woman having had a child in 1991 and another in 2007 would by now, by dint of being entitled to receive child benefit, have accrued 28/35 of a full state pension, even if she’d not worked a single day and lived off benefits throughout that time.
Pretty good return on £0 NIC paid.
Excavator Man wins the thread
Might be a bit harsh to say she’s possibly the only commentator who is similarly prolific (I’m disregarding some of the newer Guardianistas Tim has pointed out on here who only have less than a dozen articles) to Owen Jones and Richard Murphy and is more stupid but it’s the equivalent of medieval scholastic arguments over the number of angels on a pin head. All are irredeemably idiotic and need to be the among the first three recipients of the 25% Socialist tax on all assets which will follow abolition of the secret ballot….
Baby boomers are bad, but only when they are men.
“So if the government takes an extra £50k from your bank account, you’d simply say “It was my own fault – I should have seen that coming”?”
As I think I said before on another thread about this, does your argument apply to taxes that go up as well? We could well have a Labour government in the not too distant future that wants to put top rate taxes up to 70-80%, which will happen overnight. Do the people thus affected get to demand some sort of special treatment? A rise of 20 points in the top rate could easily cost someone 20k/yr in taxes, so maybe 100k over a 5 year Parliament. What comeback do they have?
‘These older, poorer women’s lives were very different from younger women now.’
If Polly hadn’t enthusiastically supported for decades a State spending money like a pissed-up sailor with a bounty who has just hit port after two years without leave, in fact consistently criticising it for not spending enough, then it is possible we could have had a society where women, and men, received the State Pension at 60.
A small part of Arts spending could probably pay for this.
A small part of the Overseas Aid budget very probably would.
Perhaps the surplus we give the EU would cover it?
Opportunity cost, Polly. You spend it all on something else.
As the most recommended comment on the Graun article points out, for decades women enjoyed retiring earlier and also living longer, giving them a vastly better return on their NI than men.
Any complaints about inequality then?
All this bullshit about fairness boils down to “more for meeee!”
The intellectual and moral contortions that these leftie fvckers can manage in support of their spurious arguments is truly more impressive than the twisting of octopuses.
Many tax changes are introduced immediately, sometimes with retroactive effect and can undo careful plans made in good faith with potentially catastrophic effects.
My wife’s view: ‘If only the feminists had kept their traps shut I’d be getting a pension at 60.’
“My wife’s view: ‘If only the feminists had kept their traps shut I’d be getting a pension at 60.’”
I doubt it. The sums dictate otherwise, and while the changes are being hung on the ‘equality between the sexes’ peg, they would have come regardless, the status quo was utterly unaffordable. Hence why pension ages weren’t equalised in the middle – it was about getting the figure up to save the Treasury £££.
I’m heartened that even in the Guardian the comments saying ‘The poor women deserve more £££!’ are getting a good kicking……..
Why would you complain about inequality when it was unequal in your favour, wouldn’t it make more sense to keep quiet about it? Maybe you are some kind of moral purist who thinks that all inequality is evil, even when it is in your favour. But then to complain about it when the playing field has been levelled really does make no sense.
In 1989, my father warned me, aged 18 as I then was, not to expect a state pension.
Hasn’t happened yet. But I’ve no doubt he was broadly correct. The money will just run out. If it’s not me, it’ll be my daughter. Or her children.
Too many something-for-nothing-ers.
I appreciated then the unfairness of being required to contribute to something in the mere nominal expectation of it paying out. And, worse than that, paying the debts of those who’d gone before, who hadn’t troubled to work out how their freebies would be paid for.
My conclusion then and at all points since? Government is crap, and there does not seem to be a whole lot one can do about it. It’s not a sexism thing. It’s a crapism thing. Done on a government-wide scale, it’s, colour me amazed, crap and impoverishing.
And don’t get me started on private schemes, aka, Chancellor’s fluffers.
Atlas shrugs.
Unless you’re in the public sector, obvs. Or umbillically connected to it. Oliver Robbins, yes, you, Robbins. You toady, you cretin. I’m looking at you, and your Ilk.
Doing what “hard manual jobs” – bin women, off-shore fisher woman, sewage pipe clearer, roofer, brickie, scaffolder? School dinners more likely
Yet Guardian keep telling us tthe young are suffering, can’t buy a house, can’t afford rent, massive student loans blah whine
@Hallowed Be @Excavator Man @Jim @Rob @Andrew C
+1
@Chris Miller
-1
“These older, poorer women’s lives were very different from younger women now.”
What are we talking about here? Women born in the 1590s? Oh, wait, it’s the 1950s actually.
Entering adult life in the 70s. It wasn’t THAT bad.
FFS, those ‘poor’ women had it a fuck sight easier than their mothers.
@ Pcar
Not if you were born in the 1950s – school leaving age wasn’t fourteen, And women born in the 1950s didn’t work in hard manual jobs – only men did.
Polly doesn’t know what she is talking about (surprise?). I was born in 1946 and school-leaving age was 15 for my generation.
On Monday my wife and I walked over along a disused railway track to the next town but one and as we approached a railway viaduct met and chatted to a steam-engine enthusiast, found that he and I were the same age and he asked if I could remember the wage for my first job – which I could: £6 a week and he responded with £2 1s 6d!! I knew that I and the other two were paid “over the odds” but I hadn’t realised the extent. [While I was recovering from the shock my wife explained that my first job was as a computer programmer so there was some reason for the higher wage.]
Even adjusting for inflation my state pension is more than double his starting wage. On my way back I found him shovelling stable manure. Polly thinks (no, not thinks: complains) that women are being treated unfairly because they can only retire when 8+ years younger than this guy who is still working manually. Let her shovel manure if she wants equality.
Let her shovel manure…
She may not shovel it John77, but she spouts it right enough, all over the pages of the bloody Guardian.
” But then to complain about it when the playing field has been levelled really does make no sense.”
It makes sense if you’re utterly self absorbed, and are incapable of seeing anything other than your own self interest. Hang on, who is it complaining again……..ah, women………..makes sense………..
Pcar,
Doing what “hard manual jobs” – bin women, off-shore fisher woman, sewage pipe clearer, roofer, brickie, scaffolder? School dinners more likely
I think I’ve mentioned it here, Heather Heying (eveolutionary biologist & Mrs Brett Weinstein see Evergreen State College idiocy that drove them out) made a point that most women weren’t really bothered about job equality until the ’70s when it became obvious that jobs were moving in to the office and becoming physically easier.
The really issue here is that the pension age for both sexes isn’t heading towards 80 or even higher given current life expectancy. It might mean some other form of social security for manual labourers but most people in our service economy have fairly easy work.
As an aside, I’m sure I read or heard that Nye Bevan originally proposed the state pension as being fully funded by NI, but when the rest of the cabinet realised what this meant they overruled him.
“These older, poorer women, won’t have the same money as men!!!”
If they’re poor women, too poor to pay all the NICs, then they’ll get pension credits to top up their pension to a full NIC pension. Oh, wait, you mean those “poor” women who don’t qualify for pension top-up because they’re too not-poor to get them.
Entering adult life in the 70s. It wasn’t THAT bad.
I was under the impression that adult life in the 70s was that bad thanks to the Callaghan government.
@ Ted S
Wilson became PM in 1974 – so it depends *when* in the 1970s.
@Ted
Margaret Thatcher became PM in 1979 and fixed broken Britain
“…women’s pension age has been raised, to 65 last year, to 66 next year, giving many no chance to build up a pension.”
Let me rephrase that: “…women’s pension age has been raised, to 65 last year, to 66 next year, giving women an extra 5-6 years to build up a pension.”