Meanwhile, other reports indicate that about 15 million people have no pension savings and face a bleak future in retirement. The Financial Lives survey of 13,000 consumers by the FCA, the biggest of its kind, found that 31% of UK adults have no private pension provision and will have to rely entirely on the state in their retirement. The full state pension is £159.55 per week, but that is only available to individuals who have a complete record of national insurance contributions.
Of particular worry is the group of people aged over 50 who are not paying into a pension and have few years left to build one up before they reach their 60s. When the FCA asked why they had made no provision, 32% said it was too late to set one up, 26% said they could not afford it and 12% said they were relying on their partner’s pension.
Auto-enrolment has brought millions of people into pension saving for the first time, but millions of self-employed and part-time workers are not in the scheme. Then turning to another report in The Guardian we see that British workers can expect among the worst pensions in the developed world. This is as councils are set to spend more than 40% of their budgets on adult social care.
A lot of people are already wondering why they are paying more council tax than ever while essential services are cut back. This is essentially why. The current economic model is preventing ordinary people from acquiring capital and the welfare state, serving as a psychological backstop is causing people not to plan for the future. The state can't keep pace and is having to cannibalise basic functions of government just to prop up our entitlements.
To fix this it will take something radical but anything radical will necessarily require some deeply unpopular choices. And look what happened to Mrs May when the media labelled her social care reforms as the "dementia tax". Ain't no politician ever going there again.
For the meantime we are plugging the gap with immigration but contrary to academic belief, immigrants also get old and grow sick. Moreover, the marginal rate of growth immigration does prop up does not outpace the growing pressures on public services. The Tories have just given the NHS another massive bailout but it will be back for more within a few years.
Meanwhile we see growing pressure on virtually every mode of infrastructure. We are already looking at a water crisis on top of a rail capacity crunch and Britain's homebuilding is unlikely to keep pace, forcing us to live in smaller spaces and paying higher rents. This in turn creates greater pressure on roads as the number of vehicles per household increases. There is also a looming energy gap.
Britain is less than twenty years away from a perfect storm where all of these crises converge. Many of these issues were the subject of debate ten years ago. Warnings were issues then and government failed to act. In many respects the problem has been made worse by the injection of EU CO2 targets meaning that whatever investment we make is spend on useless white elephants such as wind farms and tower cladding.
Of course, no one could say I politicians have been negligent. The trivia that concerns everyday people like housing, pensions, energy supply and road capacity must always take second place to more important matters like low level letter boxes and offensive billboards on the tube. Black kids may be stabbing each other to death by the dozen each month but that's just what they do right? All part and parcel of living in a big city. Just so long as nobody is offended, then we're all set.
There are a number of burgeoning problems but most of them can be traced back to one factor. Westminster. The system, for reasons outlined at length previously on this blog, just doesn't work. Spending is centrally mandated and much of our spending goes on meeting targets as set by EU directives and much of the delay and expense comes from burdensome red tape which has nothing to do with trade or transboundary concerns.
As much a s the structure of government doesn't work, our politics is also broken. No expense is spared with it comes to industrial scale virtue signalling. We can always depend on them to throw big money at political gestures and makework schemes like Hinkley Point, creating jobs in their backyard, but this is only a sticking plaster and in many cases, without having addressed the underlying problems, make things worse.
Should Britain stay in the EU then very rapidly our politicians forget all about 2016 and the message sent at the referendum. Within weeks the media will be mack to its usual routine and MPs will go back to debating what should be allowed in children's packed lunches. They'll throw us the bone of electoral reform but nothing that meaningfully challenges their incumbency.
Sooner or later things will start to break down. The justice system already has. The only people who can get justice are those who can afford it. Meanwhile, as more police forces and councils are amalgamated, more essential local services will be pruned, parks will no longer be maintained and potholes will become the norm. We're halfway there already.
Brexiters take flak for not having a plan, but at least leavers recognise the need for change. Remainers not only do not have a plan, they propose more of the same. Any time we read a Guardian tome on how Brexit can be avoided the proposal is always more directly elected mayors, regional super quangos, more borrowing and more "regeneration investment" in the regions - most of which will be syphoned off by consultants and tier one contract firms.
Meanwhile they propose to do precisely nothing about immigration and have nothing in their intellectual toolkit to address their societal malaise that afflicts Britain. This is partly because remainers don't even recognise there is such a malaise - not least because they are the manifestation of it. You only need to look at remain's "yoof" advocates to see that and listen to their reasoning for staying in the EU. It's all about the superficial perks that benefit them personally.
As much as Britain needs a total rethink of governance top to bottom, and a complete overhaul of democracy, we're not going to get anything close to that without a seismic shift in priorities. I have been encouraged to see how Brexit has already torpedoed a number of white elephants. HS2 is being downscaled and may yet be scrapped. The Swansea tidal lagoon has been chopped and the planned nuclear power plants that were set to balloon in costs face an uncertain future. We can expect to see more of this.
Eventually it will become clear even to our own government that it has no option but to address the bloated state and the corrosive system of entitlements. Sooner or later they will have to treat the public like adults and tell them that hard choices have to be made. The public won't like it, but then it's high time we had a prime minister willing to make the unpopular choices.
I take the view that the Blair regime never really ended. The state appropriated a number of social functions previously carried out by social enterprises at community level. The Blair regime destroyed community voluntarism, turning childcare into an ossified and expensive profession and absorbing charities into the third sector - turning them into full time grant chasers. The state has successfully made us all in some way dependent on the state. Now we find that model cannot be sustained and the state cannot execute those functions nearly as well as people organising for themselves.
Ultimately the public are going to have to do the heavy lifting in the wake of Brexit. They will need to do things on their own initiative with their own time and their own capital. The resourcefulness, intellect and resilience of government may be exhausted but that cannot be said of the British people. It's time we took back control of our own affairs, not only taking power back from Brussels but also from London - taking back the control they had no business taking away from us. If we want a better Britain then it is we who will have to build it. Brexit marks the beginning of that long road.
For all that Brexit creates "uncertainty", it also creates a window of opportunity. It forces changes and removes the political constraints. It also shines a torch on why the current model is unsustainable. There is only one certainty in British politics right now; that we literally cannot afford to keep things as they are. A return to the status quo is only a temporary respite - but the consequences of not acting now are far graver than even the direst of Brexit warnings.
No comments:
Post a Comment