MSE News: ’Women's state pension petition secures second Parliamentary debate

Scotswimmen

Daniel 54-Zagfles added a rolling, laughing head, whilst, ironically, defining what being an 'adult' was(?) beneath a post of mine (mentioning CSA), which he copied. This is inappropriate, given the subject matter of my post- which is what I was expressing in my post. You will need to ask him to delete his post. I stand by my views re: Shills/Trolls as very angry at some of the comments (previously mentioned) I saw on this/other sites (& not because I disagree but because they were hateful). I have been replying to others who I presumed were writing to me/mentioned my name but finished with MSE.

colsten

Daniel54 wrote: »

But the aim of the WASPI campaign appears to be compensation for all 1995 and 2011 women,irrespective of need.

Indeed, it's what they say on their Facebook, and it's what they told the Work & Pensions Committee on December 16 2015.

Anne Keen: Yes, so we think this has had a major impact and influence upon that. Basically, what we are asking—and we feel this is a very fair ask—is for the Government to put all women in their 50s, born on or after 6 April 1951 and affected by the state pension age in exactly the same position they would have been in had they been born on or before 5 April 1950

Daniel54 wrote: »

That is never going to happen.

Agreed.

Interestingly, WASPI Towers made the staggering admission day before yesterday that their demands have been unreasonable by tweeting that they "now have to be reasonable":



Though they still seem to think the government would negotiate with them, which is also never going to happen.

jem16

saver861 wrote: »

You can look at the weekly average and the average for the week that MSE put their name to it. You will see the spike.

I didn't realise that I could view these figures. Can you show me where to find that information so I can take a look please?

jem16

Good piece here basically pointing out that the biggest duty to inform lies upon yourself.

http://henrytapper.com/2016/01/31/waspi-did-we-fail-in-our-duty-of-care/

bigadaj

It is ironic that the people to whom the state pension, and specifically the age at which it is paid, is so fundamental to their future plans are those that fail to observe any changes made to it.

zagfles

jem16 wrote: »

I didn't realise that I could view these figures. Can you show me where to find that information so I can take a look please?

Can't answer your question but I wouldn't be at all surprised if MSE highlighting it caused a spike. The site is very widely read, vast majority of whom never post on the forums. Martin's weekly email gets sent to 10 million!

So if just 1% of them signed the petition that would be 100,000! As it is, it seems only 0.3% did, if the spike was another 30,000 signatures. So on that basis, 99.7% of MSE readers don't support the petition

Pollycat

Scotswimmen wrote: »

Missbiggles-I suspected you were a'teacher' & I was close-FE similar thing (I have done both). Reading between the lines (in previous posts), you have quite a settled income & my point is that this may be impacting on your empathy for others who are less fortunate/relying on State Pension. For you to say to another woman -me (who hasn't said anything offensive-just expressed her views, including well known theories about perpetrators of hateful messages online-in 1 Post-at that time) that she 'shames other women' is particularly abhorrent because you profess to have been a Union rep. When I was one, my role was to give a voice to those who felt they were being treated unfairly.

John Macnicol has written an excellent book on the whole pretend Pensions Fund crisis: "Dept of work and work and work and no pensions". There was an article about it in The Telegraph (online too) last Nov: 'The Money Lab: the move to later retirement ages is driven by neoliberal ideology rather than economics or demographics'. I suggest folk read this (as I said I am speaking as an individual-not a group). Money is available to bomb Syria/pay for Trident & bail out bankers so should be available to assist older women (for a limited period of time) who are facing hardship, because the goalposts keep changing.

Missbiggles-why don't you write-under your own name-to your local paper-that the 136,692 who have signed the petition (including MPs within the Labour party you support/ed) are, by default, a 'shame to all women'.

Actually, Scotswimmen, I did sign the petition.
I signed it after reading about it on here.
I didn't read anything on the WASPI Facebook page because I do not 'do' FB.
I thought the petition - reproduced here in its entirety:

Make fair transitional state pension arrangements for 1950’s women The Government must make fair transitional arrangements for all women born on or after 6th April 1951 who have unfairly borne the burden of the increase to the State Pension Age (SPA). Hundreds of thousands of women have had significant changes imposed on them with a lack of appropriate notification

▼More details The 1995 Conservative Government’s Pension Act included plans to increase women’s SPA to 65, the same as men’s. Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI), agree with equalisation, but don’t agree with the unfair way the changes were implemented – with little/no personal notice (1995/2011 Pension Acts), faster than promised (2011 Pension Act), and no time to make alternative plans. Retirement plans have been shattered with devastating consequences.

was clumsily worded and although I didn't agree that 1995 changes should have been included, I did agree that the 2011 changes were unfair - so I signed it.

I then discovered - again through MSE - that what WASPI had put in the petition was nothing like the demands they were making on Facebook.

As such, I feel that WASPI have shamed me (and all women who have the same opinion as me) by not including details of their totally unreasonable demands on their petition.

bowlhead99

jem16 wrote: »

saver861 wrote: »

Well you can always invoke the Probability Theory and come to a more conclusive rationale.

However, I don't think you need to go to such lengths. You can look at the weekly average and the average for the week that MSE put their name to it. You will see the spike. Without a better explanation you would then have to conclude the obvious.

I didn't realise that I could view these figures. Can you show me where to find that information so I can take a look please?

If the weekly statistics are available, they don't make it obvious. But:
MSE released an article on 14 December http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/family/2015/12/womens-state-pension-petition-gathers-over-50000-signatures saying, among other things:
"More than 55,600 women have so far backed the petition". We don't know how long it takes to 'go to press' on an MSE article but presumably the number was lower than 60,000 by the time it was published on 14 December otherwise in 'throwing their weight behind the campaign' the headline would have been been 'gathers over 60,000 signatures' rather than 'gathers over 50,000 signatures'.

Ten days later, by 24 December, the number of petitioners was up to 92,814.
https://web.archive.org/web/20151224111418/https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/110776

So over the ten day period there was a 'spurt' of about 35k signatures or about 60%. That would probably represent the fastest period of growth in terms of actual numbers being added. Previously, it hadn't added as many as 35000 signatures in each of the other five 10-day periods since the petition began in late October. However, any petition with a lot of signers often exhibits an exponential growth rate as the people who have signed it spread the word, with a chart of signatures going up in a 'growth curve'.

It is therefore more useful to look at percentage growth rates rather than absolute numbers. For example, lets contend that 60% growth in ten days is merely "normal". We can work backwards. At 24 Dec it was 93k. At 14 Dec before the 60% per 10 day growth spurt it was 56k. At 4 Dec before 60% growth was added in it would have just been 35k. At 24 Nov before 60% growth was added in it would have just been 22k. At 14 Nov before 60% growth was added in it would have just been 14k. At 4 Nov before 60% growth was added in it would have just been 9k. At 25 October before 60% growth was added in it would have just been 5.5k. And the petition started on 20 October with WASPI and their mates creating those first few thousands signups in the first few days. (Gov website says it closes on 20 April 2016 after the standard 6 months, so must have started 20 Oct)

So, it doesn't seem at all unreasonable to say that the number of signed petitions was growing at 60% per ten days. If MSE pump out an article about it on 14 December to throw their weight behind the campaign - and it still just grows at 60% over the next 10 days - then there is no 'spike'. All you are seeing is the absolute numbers grow rapidly, which is what always happens to things growing exponentially. Like a virus being passed around the population, you pass to two friends, they pass to two new friends and so on and by the end of the week you are 'infecting' 64 friends and 128 friends and 256 each day as it spreads.

So, firstly, there is no clear 'spike'. But since the 96k on Christmas eve, the 60% per ten day growth rate has fallen off, the curve started to plateau. There are some logical reasons for this.

One is the impetus, the key driver to bother to give your personal details to a government website, diminishes when the objective is "this will be considered by govt if it reaches 100k sigs" and it has already reached 100k sigs. It was at 96k on Christmas eve. After we've all got our turkey on, it dribbled over the finish line to 100k, and there is no real pressure to keep growing. By the first week of Jan it was already scheduled for a backbenchers' debate in the Commons on 7 Jan with an acknowledgement it would be taken to a further debate if needed. So, perhaps not surprising that 'only' 35000 signatures were added in the whole of Jan rather than the 35000 per ten days when MSE went to press.

Also, the growth in something like this inevitably plateaus as you reach saturation. In the 'virus' analogy above, by day 20 you reach a million ; by day 26 you hit the population of the UK at 67 million and before the month is out you're at a billion. So, exponential growth does not persist forever.

So, there is nothing in that to suggest that the patterns of petition signups were heavily driven by MSE or that there's a 'spike' correlating with MSE announcements. Whatever MSE themselves might like to claim about their success and far reaching impact.

Secondly: let's pretend that there was a spike around the time of the MSE announcement / article.

This could have been caused by any number of things.
-Perhaps a WASPI tweet was picked up by someone else with a lot of followers.
-Perhaps the number of 'shares' of a support group on facebook surged as a consequence of the natural ebb and flow of social networks.
-Perhaps the topic was 'trending' because it was a dry week for news and there was no real competition.
-Perhaps the kind of people who would blog about this stuff are women in their 40s to 60s and they mentioned it in their popular blogs about the Strictly Come Dancing final on 19 Dec.
-Perhaps people were motivated to sign up after reading the news articles written about the Westminster Hall debate from a week or two earlier. We know, don't we, that 50s women are not expected to keep on top of news announcements as they come out in real time, but will get to them in their own good time, so maybe a 2 week 'delayed reaction' is to be expected.

So, even if there was a spike, which there wasn't, it would be incredibly naive to say that most of it came from MSE, when there are a myriad of other potential reasons. The idea that we should "invoke the Probability Theory and come to a conclusive rationale" that MSE must have done it, or that "You will see the spike. Without a better explanation you would then have to conclude the obvious." is painfully naïve and shows up a complete lack of critical thought.

I refer you to a website which may give you pause for thought when jumping to conclusions which mistake correlation for causation.
http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

jem16

bowlhead99 wrote: »

If the weekly statistics are available, they don't make it obvious.

Which is why I'm more interested in the actual statistics rather than whether or not there is a spike.

Saver861 has gone a little quiet on providing a link to them so I can only conclude that;

a) the statistics aren't available and he was making the whole lot up

OR

b) he is able to see the statistics which would of course be available to the Waspi campaign.

Now I can probably invoke the Probability Theory and decide which of the two conclusions is more likely.

So, even if there was a spike, which there wasn't, it would be incredibly naive to say that most of it came from MSE, when there are a myriad of other potential reasons. The idea that we should "invoke the Probability Theory and come to a conclusive rationale" that MSE must have done it, or that "You will see the spike. Without a better explanation you would then have to conclude the obvious." is painfully naïve and shows up a complete lack of critical thought.

Well quite and answered much more eloquently than I could have put it.

hyubh

Scotswimmen wrote: »

Oh I see, I wasn't aware anyone would be insulted by Shill/Troll comments

Please cut out the repeated accusations of opponents being paid to post what they are posting here. No one on this board is a plant or a stooge for an anti-WASPI organisation (i.e., a 'shill').

I stand by my views as very angry at some of the comments I saw on this/other sites (& not because I disagree but because they were hateful).

Point exactly to the comments on here that are 'hateful' in your view. In the future, if a post is really out of line you can use the 'report' button, and if necessary post a small reply suggesting others do the same (the MSE moderators are deliberately low key but do actually exist).