WASPI Campaign .... State Pensions

jem16

What saddens me most about the Steve Bee article, apart from the obvious issues highlighted above, is the lack of a solution from him.

According to this he was for two decades recognised as a "pensions guru", so surely well able to help WASPI come up with something tangible instead of airy-fairy.

https://www.corporate-adviser.com/issues/march-2012/steve-bee-not-a-pension-expert-any-more/

He's obviously a WASPI supporter from his tweets but has refused to offer any solution despite being asked many times. As with WASPI the answer is always - it's down to the government. Yet he is probably far more able to come up with ideas than anyone in the government themselves.

Back in February he came out in support of the actuarially reduced pension but guess what - WASPI and many of its supporters who gave evidence firmly rejected that idea.

https://www.moneymarketing.co.uk/issues/11-february-2016/steve-bee-give-people-early-access-to-state-pensions/

So come on Steve Bee - instead of writing an article full of rhetoric and misplaced "facts", how about coming up with a workable solution?

bmm78

To be fair to Steve, he was banging the drum about state pension reform long before anyone knew what a "Waspi" was.

He does raise some valid points, but avoids the rather thorny issue of what should actually be done to resolve the issue. It's obviously ludicrous to suggest that Waspi are doing this "for the children", rather than just for themselves.

Personally, I think we need to be focusing on the Cridland review and deal with the findings of that, rather than noise from a campaign group.

jem16

bmm78 wrote: »

To be fair to Steve, he was banging the drum about state pension reform long before anyone knew what a "Waspi" was.

Exactly which is why I don't understand his stance on refusing to put forward any solutions.

At least John Ralfe made a suggestion and costed it.

bmm78

jem16 wrote: »

Exactly which is why I don't understand his stance on refusing to put forward any solutions.

At least John Ralfe made a suggestion and costed it.

Proposing a solution (other than the Big Ask) involves excluding large sections of the people you are trying to appeal to, or exposing yourself as an economic illiterate. There isn't any real incentive for him to go any further than he needs to, as his solutions almost certainly fall into the first category.

While it can be argued that the article is lightweight, it will get plenty of reposts and generate a good bit of kudos.

No-one can provide a solution to the Waspi issue, as there isn't any action that can be taken that resolves the issue. The options for someone writing an article that supports the cause are therefore limited to emotive fluff.

As summed up well by the current Secretary of State for Work and Pensions:

"there is no policy solution emerging from all of these intense discussions that...is not going to have a massive fiscal impact...I don’t see that there is a doable policy solution that we could take as a Parliament, that undoes whatever grievance the women affected currently feel"

jem16

bmm78 wrote: »

Proposing a solution (other than the Big Ask) involves excluding large sections of the people you are trying to appeal to, or exposing yourself as an economic illiterate. There isn't any real incentive for him to go any further than he needs to, as his solutions almost certainly fall into the first category.

While it can be argued that the article is lightweight, it will get plenty of reposts and generate a good bit of kudos.

And there we have it in a nutshell - it's all about the publicity that they generate for themselves. Just like Martin Lewis and Paul Lewis plus all of the "supporting" MPs.

All leading WASPI up the garden path.

agarnett

bmm78 wrote: »

Personally, I think we need to be focusing on the Cridland review and deal with the findings of that, rather than noise from a campaign group.

What's the rationale for your thoughts on Cridland?

bmm78

agarnett wrote: »

What's the rationale for your thoughts on Cridland?

Any recommendations from Cridland should be evidence-based and take all cohorts into account, neither of which applies to the Waspi debate.

Malthusian

The very start of the answer to Steve's question "Why WASPI are right to complain" is "The issues highlighted by the WASPI campaign are not solely related to 1950s-born women. They affect men and women born in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and beyond." This is a pretty outstanding bit of doublethink. The very raison d'etre of WASPI is to exclude everyone from consideration who wasn't born in the 1950s. The reason they are complaining is because people born in the "and beyond" can no longer afford to pay for women born in the 1950s to retire 5 years earlier than men. Hence the democratically elected government of the time passed the 1995 and 2011 Pension Acts.

There seems to have been little or even any thought in the run up to the 1995 changes as to how so many older people could be accommodated within the workforce. The future availability of so many jobs for so many people across the entire country would surely too have been a momentous task for our businessmen and bureaucrats to engineer, even if they had the money and motivation to do it.

This isn't a planned economy and it isn't the government's responsibility to find a job for every able-bodied person currently on the sofa watching daytime TV. People need to eat, people need shelter, and people need to enjoy their free time. Where there are people, there is always work. When they work, they have more money to spend, which creates more work. The idea that there is a fixed number of jobs to go around is one of the sillier folk myths.

The rest is a hodge-podge of rabbinical whinging about how things ain't what they used to be. Yes, it's a shame people of my generation can't save in a final salary pension scheme. What's that got to do with WASPI? Reverting the state pension age to 60 for women born in the 50s won't re-open the final salary schemes (if anything the opposite, because we'll have to massively increase taxes, and guess what the easiest target for taxation in the country is - yep, pensions not yet in payment). And it applies to men as well.

Four years ago Steve Bee said he was "not a pensions expert any more". I think we can leave it there.

bigadaj

Well the OP has been successful in dredging this up again as a lively discussion.

saver861

WASPI? Are they still around? huh?

Man, I'm confused.

I keep hearing on here that WASPI are out of line, way way too greedy, totally inept at running a campaign, don't answer questions, don't do this, that, and even the other ......

Rationale would dictate that, with such incompetence, any organisation would have wilted and disappeared, long long time ago.

Yet, that's not happened and it seems they are popping up all over various media both local and national. Rather than disappearing they are ever present and growing.

So so confusing for little ole meeeeee ....

hmmmm .....