Fortune favours the brave. My hope is that the party that reaches out beyond its comfort zone — and the sterile zero-sum game with its Right-of-centre rival — will be rewarded for it.
Let us at least be honest about what the triple lock has become: not a narrow guarantee against poverty, but a very large and politically protected transfer to the most electorally powerful age bloc in the country.
One cannot resolve whole-systems problems with component level solutions. Perhaps Government could do an income inequality and poverty audit on all it does to ensure it is reducing and not increasing them.
The pensions triple lock is a policy that everyone in Westminster knows is unaffordable. The delusion is so potent that it has led some to claim that those calling for pension spending restraint are ‘far left’. We really are flying upside down.
The current system places an unsustainable burden on the working-age population and is fundamentally misaligned with the UK’s demographic and fiscal realities.
There has to be a plan to reform taxation and set people free to do better than the state can do on their behalf.
Freezing working age benefits in cash terms whilst pensioners get a surge above prices or earnings cannot be defended, even by pensioners who care about future generations. The time has come to redress the balance and do a bit more for working age families.
As Britain experiences a brain drain of Nick (30), aka young professionals, the triple lock and a wapping welfare bill remain in their place. Will the Tories wake up to it?
There is a triple lock elephant in the room of the excellent, honest and increasingly well made argument that says we must live within our means, cut public spending, and reduce borrowing, as the unpleasant medicine that will make us all better (off) eventually.
Labour failure is not enough: the Tories must make the moral case for a state which does less, and does it better.
The Tories might have an easier time delivering cuts to working-age benefits, but those don’t even rank in the top three spending areas pushing tax as a percentage of GDP endlessly upwards.
The state pension was never meant to be a cash transfer from the (generally poorer) working age people to the (generally richer) over-65s, but that is what it has become.
Jean-Claude Juncker, of all people, summed up the current state of politics: “We all know what to do. But we don’t know how to get reelected once we have done it.”
At present, they have no desire to make themselves and their families figures of public hate and are uninterested in the ‘super councillor’ role of a modern MP.
Countries such as Japan, Italy and South Korea have discovered the hard way what happens when action is delayed. Britain has so far preferred to look the other way. We cannot afford to any longer.