A £10,000 PAYMENT should be given to the young, while pensioners are taxed more, a new report by the Resolution Foundation into inter-generational fairness in the UK suggests. Under the banner of ‘be fair to the youth’ the Foundation is simply raising from the dead, and further developing, the policy through which PM May lost her majority in the 2017 general election.
This was that the elderly should exchange their homes for the ‘expensive’ health care that they require till the end of their days. It provoked fury from both pensioners who would lose their homes and from young people who would lose their inheritance.
The attempt to divide the youth from the elderly exploded in the face of the May government, but now it seems that the ruling class are coming back for more, with a modified policy to try to enroll the youth in their project by stoking up a war between the generations.
Resolution Foundation chairman Lord Willetts says that without draconian measures there can be no social cohesion, the NHS will become too expensive to be funded. Willetts is busy inciting the youth against their parents saying that the ‘contract’ between young and old has ‘broken down’, and predicting that without stepping up the taxation of the elderly, young people would become increasingly angry.
The crude sweetener for the youth to turn on their parents is Willetts’ plan that all young adults at the age of 25 would be given £10,000 to be funded by a new ‘lifetime receipts tax’, that would replace inheritance tax, and result in relieving their parents of their savings and then, no doubt, their homes. In a further penalty for the elderly, Willetts wants to make the earnings of those above state pension age subject to national insurance contributions!
In fact, the Foundation’s Inter-generational Commission report calls for an NHS ‘levy’ of £2.3bn to be paid for by increased national insurance contributions by those over the age of 65. The cross-party commission includes input from the heads of the CBI business lobby group and, to their eternal shame, the turncoats of the Trades Union Congress.
The report states that the youth who receive the £10,000 at the age of 25 can use it to help pay for a deposit on a home, at the same time, no doubt, that their parents are losing their homes paying a lifetime in receipts tax, and extra national insurance contributions.
Lord Willetts concluded: ‘We’ve got a very serious problem of ensuring there’s a fair deal across the generations. ‘Older people are worried about a properly funded healthcare system, people in middle age still haven’t been able to buy their own home, and for younger people their pay is no better than it was 10 or 15 years ago.’
Lord Willetts said that a lot of the problems had been created by political inertia by a series of governments. ‘We still feel the obligations that generations have to each other, and families are incredibly important in discharging those obligations. But when you look at public policy sadly, when it comes to a properly funded healthcare system, houses available so that people can achieve their goal of owner-occupation and a fair deal in pay for younger people – in all those ways, that contract between the generations has not been maintained.’
This is a disgraceful attack on older workers. It is the crisis of the capitalist system, where a handful of the super-rich own the planet’s wealth, while the people of the world are becoming poorer and poorer, and the system lurches towards another even bigger financial crash, that is the source of the mass poverty that stalks the major capitalist states.
The way out of this crisis is not through some war of the generations, in which the TUC is playing its part, but in stepping up the class war through mobilising the working class, uniting both younger and older workers, to carry out a socialist revolution. This will expropriate the bosses and bankers and bring in a socialist planned economy, whose maxim will be: ‘From each according to their ability to each according to their need.’
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