In the lead-up to the election the main parties are targeting
pensioners because they know older people are more liable to vote. They think we are going to vote for their right-wing
policies because we are all more conservative and afraid of losing our pensions.
Speaking as a pensioner who has fairly
typical views let me tell you what kind of policies I’d vote for.
1. I want to live in
a country where there is a fair system of taxation based on the principle that
each pays according to their means. This means taxing earnings, rather than
commodities, a higher rate of taxation on incomes above £150,000, and taxing
international companies on what they earn in the country where they earn
it regardless of where the company is registered.
2. I want to live in a country where my taxes are spent on
providing services to the citizens of my country, not on lining the pockets of
the pariah businesses that all our essential services have been out-sourced to.
What’s
the point of pumping money into the NHS when more than half of it has been contracted
out to privatized companies that are motivated by profit not patients’
needs?
3. I want my gas, electricity, and water provided by publicly-owned
companies that provide essential services at fair and accountable rates. I don’t want to live in a country where I am
telephoned several times a week by companies trying to persuade me to change my
service provider and where failure to shop around and regularly change my
provider will result in my being over-charged.
4. I want the railways to be safe, reliable and reasonably
priced, not fragmented private businesses that don’t bother to maintain tracks
where it costs too much.
5. I want the right to buy council houses repealed and
proper council housing to be restored. I don’t want my taxes being spent on
housing benefit whose sole purpose is to line the pockets of private landlords,
whilst the benefit recipients are blamed for not being able to afford the inflated
rents. I want a stable and fair housing
market where those on middle incomes can afford to buy their own homes at prices
that have not been inflated by the abolition of council housing and its replacement
by the buy–to–let money grabbers.
6. I want to live in a country where the needs of its citizens
are more important than fighting wars abroad as a proxy/client of the USA. Trident should be abolished and our armed
forces reduced to a genuinely defensive force whose only area of operation is
the borders of this country. I want
ex=service men and women who have been disabled mentally or physically by
combat to be properly housed and cared for, not living on the streets.
7. I want to live in a country where everyone can retire at
60, if they wish, on a guaranteed pension, and the under-25s can have a fair
chance of getting a job because the old people have retired and freed up their
jobs.
8. I want to live in a country where people on benefits are
not treated like criminals, where migrant workers are seen as citizens and
where sick and disabled people who are unable to work are allowed to get on
with their lives without harassment from another privatized, out-sourced pariah
business administering the benefits that we all pay
tax and NI to provide.
We had 15 years of New Labour under Blair and Brown, who did
nothing to undo the damage done to our society by Thatcher, but rather, they
expanded and developed her policies. A
vote for Labour is not an alternative to the Tories. They all have the same
basic polices, which are to bolster up international businesses, the banks and the
wealthy in the name of neo-liberal free-marketism, at the expense of the
population as a whole. Parties like UKIP
are welcomed by them as they help to distract the voters from the real problems
by blaming immigrants for the lack of jobs and low wages, not the disastrous
policies of the government. Not one of
the major parties is seriously challenging this view nor offering an
alternative. The servile media help them
in this by giving Farage hours of coverage, whilst ignoring or ridiculing other,
more serious parties – like the Greens.
What the main parties, in their targeting of us pensioners,
fail to realize, is that we are the generation that had everything we grew up
with and fought for taken away from us. Including our pensions. Younger voters don’t remember these things –
permanent contracts instead of zero hours ones, workplace pension schemes,
council housing, a choice of whether to work after you had a baby because you
could afford to live on one income, I could go on. You can sneer at me for
wanting a return to outmoded ways and values, but, for all its faults, that way of doing things worked a bloody sight
better than what we have now. When I lived in Wales during the Blair years I
voted Plaid Cymru – not because I was particularly sold on the idea of independence,
but because they were the only party of the left available. If I lived in Scotland
I’d vote SNP for the same reason. I live
in England where we are being told that UKIP is the only alternative, even
though we can all see plainly that they are only saying the same thing as the
other major parties, just in a dumbed down version. There
is only one party offering anything like the vision of what I’d like for the
future of this country and that is the Green party. So that’s who I’ll be voting for.
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