On Monday 13 January 2017 the nation was told that pensioners are £20 a week better off on average than workers.
The crisis in the NHS is being blamed on an ageing population.
Headlining in the Guardian in 2016 was ‘Ageing Britain: two-fifths of NHS budget is spent on over-65s’.
Because of cuts to local care and support elderly people are unable to be released from hospital and are being called ‘bed blockers’.
We’ve had poverty porn, it worked brilliantly, so when is the bed blocker porn coming?
I’ve known for most of my life I was a baby boomer, a euphemism for what happened when the surviving troops came home after the second world war and got down to the serious business of making babies.
Without doubt contraception is a wonderful thing giving people, and women in particular, control over reproduction, but whilst it means we can all work and life plan better, a hate fest on baby boomers for growing old is not the solution to the economic crisis. Not one of us ordinary folks created the economic crisis, nor the ideological austerity that followed. This is economic warfare and as long as we play the blame game against each other manufactured by those conducting the war, we’re all going to lose.
To keep population growth stable every adult needs to pair up and have two children, for the nations population to grow some need to breed three or more children, but in fact we are a declining population as is most of Europe. The Guardian headline in 2015 was, ‘Europe needs many more babies to avert a population disaster’ that is creating a ‘”perfect demographic storm” that will imperil economic growth across the continent’.
After a life times work, pensioners are not living the life of Riley on £20 a week more than a working family. Thousands of us will die this winter, as we do every year, because we cannot afford to heat our homes. Telling us, in typical media dishonesty with weasel words, to fuck off and die, will not solve any of the problems we face.
In this time of racist anti-immigrant propaganda, immigration is one of the economic solutions to a declining working age population.
The government are more than happy for us to fight each other, they go to great lengths to promote hatred, and they are even more happy that more and more of us are dying prematurely, they’ve planned it meticulously as they have their twisted spin that we’ll all be better off under their bastard regime.
They tell us there is no money, really? The bank of England managed to create £375 billion of new money, out of thin air, to give to the banks, even after we, the people, had been forced to bail the banks out and then be responsible for the hole that created, a hole that, far from filling, the Tory government has increased, despite all their swinging cuts, caps, sanctions, sell offs and driving poverty through the roof.
It was inevitable that they’d call time on pensioners, we’re just next on the list. They have already come for jobless people, sick and disabled people, social housing under occupiers, those on poverty pay, children and young adults, doctors and nurses, students and carers, homeless people, the pensions of 50’s women and is there a town in Britain without a food bank?
I’m 66, I’ll be gone soon enough, by natural or unnatural causes, but I will not die for bullshit or go out on a lie.
What is happening is not exclusive to the UK and the Tories, it is happening across the world, ideologically, wilfully and deliberately. We, collectively, are only the problem if we make it easy for them. Please, let’s work together to make it as hard and as grisly for them as they are making it for us, not least by supporting each other. That’s the last thing they want and they certainly have no concept nor understanding of what that means. Henceforth, let’s consider care, kindness and consideration as glorious revolutionary acts of civil disobedience and above all let’s not die quietly. In whatever way, great or small, let’s make every life count. We are all sisters and brothers, even those who do not yet know or understand it.
KOG. 25 February 2017
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38957903
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/01/ageing-britain-two-fifths-nhs-budget-spent-over-65s
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jan/07/-sp-bedblockers-worsening-nhs-hospitals-crisis
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/23/baby-crisis-europe-brink-depopulation-disaster
https://positivemoney.org/2014/06/waste-375-billion-failure-quantitative-easing-video/
