We need an open debate about how much these pensions are costing the taxpayer, otherwise our children and grandchildren – probably on far less generous pension schemes themselves – will pay the price for £1.4 trillion worth of political convenience today.
The CSJ’s analysis shows that on current population estimates children in school today could face working until their mid-70s before receiving a state pension.
You may not like what Dubai has to offer, but don’t tarnish those who do with the brush of ‘tax exiles’ and ‘washed-up old footballers’. If we were able to attract their like and their ambition, instead of scaring them away, we would all feel the benefits.
The only answer is for government to get out the way, make mature technologies stand on their own financially and stop socialising the costs of Ed Miliband’s follies via consumers’ bills.
He doesn’t want to reduce spending; but spend more. He argues giving away control of the essentials, gives away control of their costs. The key is compulsory purchases and nationalisation. That’ll delight the markets!
There is no easy way out of this mess without politically difficult trade-offs to radically rationalise the system.
The most intense intellectual innovation happens around fissures where thinkers are in conscious tension with one another. But this process could also be seen as creating the soil in which new and hybrid ideas can take root and grow.
University may once have been a rite of passage, but it has become a sacred cow. While a degree will continue to offer a key to a better future for thousands, the era of university domination must now come to an end.
If you don’t set out a clear and packed agenda before ascending to power, to deliver on the receipt of a mandate at a general election, then you will be left with all barnacles and no boat.
Voluntary planning consultations and hearings are systematically unrepresentative. Participants are disproportionately older, wealthier, whiter, more likely to be homeowners, and far more hostile to new housing than the communities they claim to represent.
We should elevate education to its higher purpose of cultivating wisdom, conscience and virtue – yet they are at best sidelined, or wholly absent from modern schooling.
There are policies we can put in place that both reduce the harms caused by modern slavery while preventing any abuses that do occur.
The Tories are meant to be the party that tells the truth to the voters. And retreating to knee-jerk Nimbyism is the opposite of truth-telling.
No party can credibly claim to have an answer to the public’s dissatisfaction with British politics without a plan to increase incomes through growth.