Wednesday, December 18, 2024
Now Labour abandon Waspi women
I can certainly rememeber my then local Labour MP, the current Chancellor of the Exchequer, Work and Pensions Minister and even Keir Starmer joining protests pledging to compensate women who had lost out due to a failure of communications over their pensions, and yet, once they are in power with the ability to come good on all they campaigned for, the same politicians have gaslit those women.
The Guardian reports that campaigners for “Waspi women” hit by the rising state pension age reacted with fury on Tuesday, after work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, announced they will not be compensated by the taxpayer.
The paper says that Kendall told MPs the government accepted the parliamentary and health service ombudsman’s findings earlier this year that her department had failed to communicate the changes adequately, but she rejected its recommendation for a flat-rate compensation scheme, paying out £1,000 to £2,950 to each of the more than 3 million women affected:
Explaining the government’s decision, Kendall pointed to survey evidence from 2006, suggesting 90% of women in the relevant age group knew about the planned changes.
“Given the vast majority of women knew the state pension age was increasing, the government does not believe paying a flat rate to all women at a cost of up to £10.5bn would be fair or proportionate to taxpayers,” she told MPs.
The chair of the Women Against State Pension Inequality (Waspi) campaign, Angela Madden, condemned the announcement.
“This is a bizarre and totally unjustified move which will leave everyone asking what the point of an ombudsman is if ministers can simply ignore their decisions. It feels like a decision that would make the likes of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump blush,” she said.
The Liberal Democrats’ work and pensions spokesperson, Steve Darling, said it was a “day of shame” for Labour. “The new government has turned its back on millions of pension-age women who were wronged through no fault of their own, ignoring the independent ombudsman’s recommendations, and that is frankly disgraceful,” he said.
There was a letter to my local paper earlier this week from a Swansea Labour councillor arguing that people should not be attacking the Labour government as they have achieved so much already. Her problem of course is that people only see the failures and the betrayals, and these negatives are multiplying daily.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves stuck the knife in just weeks after the election, instantly stripping 10 million pensioners of their winter fuel payment. She then twisted the blade by axing the proposed £86,000 cap on social care costs, meaning that tens of thousands of older people will now be forced to sell their homes to cover care fees. Neither of those measures appeared in the Labour manifesto.
Then in her Budget, Reeves geared up to inheritance tax on unused pension pots from 2027, with a potential income tax bill on top, imposed a massive employers national insurance hike and brought famers into the inheritance tax regime. And now this.
This really is beginning to look like a pattern.
