To be raging at Dispatches "rich and on benefits"

[crashdoll]

It's talking about pensioners and all they get from the welfare state regardless of income or savings. Cue clip of David Scameron saying he won't touch their benefits.

Thanks expat for the welcome, but I have been on MN for a while. I should have realised that using the personal pronoun would bring accusations of It's Not All About You...good old MN cliche.

Vote them out in 2015? Good idea, except of course we'd be voting back in the mob who contributed to the economic disaster in the first place (NB I said "contributed" - not responsible for).

Bugger - my dinner's burning...shall have to leave things there for now..

no one should be exempted from the cuts. If children and the disabled aren't, then no one should be.

At a random guess, I'd think that there are likely to be more disabled pensioners being affected by the cuts to disability benefits than there are disabled children, just because so many people are affected by age related disabilities.

You know what ?
of course we are are all in this together . I am the hated boomer generation .
But am a mum too who helps my adult children. We live within the pension credit field .

I of course think everyone should share the burden . My children are your generation for goodness sake !!!

Am so sad with some of the comments here . One day if unlucky you will be older and unable to do the heavy manual work that you did . It isnt just your generation who get the short straw.
At least there are health and safety laws to protect you . My OH was on call 24/7 .....phone call at 1am usual after a full day at work regardless. And no . no overtime payment . Bad yes? We just were glad for the work.

Oh and must mention ......no child care or nurseries in my day that would take my children at 7am . We coped by no sleep during the day honest.

emotional ? yes ..........sad that you think we are all free loading off you .

I don't think anyone thinks you are free loading, just that if you can afford it, you don't need wfa. nothing to do with how long and hard you worked.

Clouds Oh well, that's ok then! We should definitley continue to give wealthy pensioners non-means tested benefits (DLA and other disability benefits exempt from this) because many of them are disabled.

basset No one hates you, you couldn't help being born then, any more than a baby born 10 minutes ago could help being born in 2013!

Thank you Mrs Koala and crashdoll .........sorry for emotional rant .
I needed grounding a bit there .
And yes to the means tested benefits for all . Never have thought otherwise .
thank you both .

grimbletart here are some good examples of ageism
The over 60s get WFA regardless of their health.
The under 60s dont even if they have an illness or disability (believe me a person under 60 undergoing cancer treatment feels the cold with a vengence.

People on jobseekers are eligible for workfare
People just turned 60 on pension credit are exempt. (workfare creates MORE unemployment I linked a Red Pepper article into another thread which mentioned a pizza company who took 100 workfarers who were working for those jobseekers and getting NO WAGE. if it was the 1970s when there was no workfare those jobs would still need doing so they would have been waged.

And while people on this thread are slagging off young people here is another good example of agism
The fact that the younger you are the LOWER minimum wage you get. And before we get any comments saying "well they dont need to be paid any more because they can live with their parents" not all young people have that choice due to an abusive home life or being orphaned.

Grimbletart all people are annoyed about is the ATTITUDE shown by the golf club pensioners in last nights programme. I dont see how that is being agist.
However as you see from my examples agism works both ways. But i dont see people standing up for the agism directed at young people with the same volition that they stand up for agism when its directed at older people.

Hi Darkesteyes: I could give some more really personal examples to match yours from my generation, but were I to do so I would probably get more of the It's Not All About You MN cliche again, so I'll desist.

I did not see the Dispatches programme (maybe I should pick it up on the computer) but what you say about golf club pensioners leads me to point back to my personal experience over many years of Dispatches (that I mentioned upthread) i.e. Dispatches always have an agenda and then pick their interviews to fit that agenda, no matter how representative or unrepresentative they are of an issue or a population at large. Dispatches needs to be watched with a sackful of salt at hand.

Its just so sad when a whole generation gets lambasted in this way.

I do agree that whichever generation one is benefits should not be universally paid out, they should be reserved for times of need / support.

There seems to be some sort of perception that all us babyboomers lived in a time of plenty and suffered no hardships ...... as others have pointed out that is just as true as todays "truth" that there are never any people on benefits that prefer to stay that way than work . Both statments have an element of truth but are hardly universal !!!!

Many of us babyboomers worked hard to get Britain out of the post war depression and were part of the generation that were involved in establishing the welfare / NHS systems that have been benefitting several generations since. Of course now we are so good at keeping people alive, and we expect so much more out of life, that its just "not enough".

We are also part of yet another recession....... as pointed out before hard times are not exclusive to this generation.

Apart from a brief period when I had two children under school age I have always worked............ because I had to, we could hardly survive on a servicemans salary (and nurses not brilliantly paid either !). My children were clothed from a thrift shop and I certainly knew how to make meals cheaply !!! My grandchildren on the other hand have never had to wear charity chop clothes even when their mothers were in receipt of benefits for short periods after partnership breakups. With support from us ( financial and childcare) they were soon off benefits and into work and moved on.

We have a house but other than that live frugally and certainly am not one of those swanning off overseas for holidays ....... I still work because I have to financially and the retiring age just keeps getting moved upwards !

Another problem is that us babyboomers keep some things afloat .....when we all finally retire there will be a lot lesss money being paid into the pot for all the services /benefits and for example the care profession will I doubt have enough people to run it. There are less young people working in it these days, the larger percentage are now in thier 50's and 60's.

I actually fear my old age beacuse I can see how things pan out ...... and I fear even more for my children and grandchildren.

Thank you grimbletart for your voice of reason

grimbletart I am in no way a fool who swallows without questioning it what i am fed, but really you should watch the Dispatches programme.

You can not deny the attitude and sense of entitlement of the golf club buddies.
I have just watched it on Iplayer again and i actually cried a little, the blatent ageism, selfishness and disregard of how times are now for working age people trying to cope with cuts is disgusting.

No one has attacked all pensioners on here, it is the attitude of those represented in the programme that has caused such rage

All of us have friends or family who are pension age and i don't think any of us would begrudge a WFA or liveable pension for people who NEED it.
But there are pensioners who can do without, they should be included in the cuts just like everyone else.
As it stands nothing absolutley nothing has been revised wrt pensioner benefits, that is simply outrageous.

Can i ask if someone has the answer to my question,, i am sure i read somewhere recently that within the next 3 yrs you will only be able to claim DLA for one person per househould?

With regard to the posters saying how comfortable life was for their parents in the 70s and 80s, surely that is exactly the point this thread is making, they are the generation we are saying are now having it easier as relatively young pensioners and proves the point that that particular age group have hit the crest of the prosperity wave all through.

My parents were ahead of that, born around 1930 and never wealthy, they really struggled financially when we were young in the 1960s. DH and I were born right at the end of the baby boom and although we have definitely had it easier than our childrens' generation, we have not had it as easy as those 10-15 years ahead of us and we face later retirement, lower pensions, etc.

I agree with those saying it is not the money, that is just luck, it is the attitude that rankles

Grimbletart indeed the voice of reason. I've just caught up with tonight's posts because I have been at an AmDram performance, where, shock horror, my ticket only cost £7 not £8 because I am a grasping OAP.

FFS Hint NO ONE here is having a go at all pensioners. It is the ATTITUDE of the ones on that programme.
REPEAT REPEAT REPEAT!!

Just for emphasis...

DarkesteyesMon 18-Mar-13 20:51:11

It was the im alright jack attitudes of those pensioners in that golf club that pissed me off.
They were going on about how people just a decade or more younger than them were "scroungers"
They had it easier with housing and jobs than any other generation. They didnt have to compete to get a paying job from a company that uses workfare.
Can you IMAGINE the uproar if workfare had been around while they were still working.
i NEVER EVER thought id live to see the day when Peter fucking STRINGFELLOW put someone to shame but thats exactly what he did with the golf club pensioners.
And that one at the end laughing and saying "ooh id bet next years membership on it. Sickening.
And before anyone starts i dont mind them getting these benefits or at least some of these benefits.
Its their attitude about it and their attitudes towards others who havent been as lucky as them which STINKS!

All I'm seeing in this thread is lot of anecdotal stories and some I'll considered and uncosted reasons for removing benefits from unpleasant people. Winter fuel allowance is a couple of hundred quid, I don't know what the internal lab our rates of the DWP are but I would imagine it would cost a bit more than 200 to assess a persons elegibility.

ill not I'll

Either we're all in this or we're not. And we're not. The past is just that. It's gone, people! It matters nowt. Zero hours contacts, sanctions, rising retirement ages, 3p/litre more come April.

And now we have a government who in a few hours will fuck all of us but themselves and perhaps, right now, whilst it serves them, their 'grey vote'. And when their policies take effect come April and later, there will be resentment and possibly worse. And they want us to hate one another. It takes our eyes off them and their cronies, of every party, who fucked us all. Over and over, for 20+ years. Every one of them.

Look at Cyprus. Everyone to pay for the cock ups of the few, who are nowhere to be found or surrounded by walls higher than any castle. You all scrabble amidst the rushes like the plebs you are, arguing about what wars you fought and what hardships you endured, we're after your money whilst you buy us £130/week in groceries, second or more homes in the Southeast, and subsidised booze after our hard working day. Scameron received the very DLA he's yanked for all other disabled children.

Divide and rule! Inflation was known to rise yesterday. And they sit, over £60k/week for their canteen and bars, imposing tax after tax and duty after duty on us.

Wag that dog!

I didn't see dispatches, but feel I can recognise the self satisfied right wing folks who made up the golf club members. These people seemed to rule the world when I was in my teens, and I guess that influenced so many of us to join the women's movement, left wing politics, go into public service rather than make much more money in the private sector. Before anyone shoots me, that's how it was, you accepted you'd never earn a lot but you'd be putting something back into society, and paying in to a pension scheme. There is such a lot of anger in this thread - it's been a relief to see comments from older women whose own families, like mine have had it tough for generations, in one way or another. I know times are tough, that's life really, we have to get on with it, and it's much more pleasant if we do so with kindness to each other. I can rant with the best of us but really ......

I was intrigued enough by this thread to watch the programme on iplayer and I can't see why everyone is so frothing. It was actually very measured and reasonable. I thought. What it revealed (to me at any rate) is that if you give people benefits, they soon feel they have an absolute right to them. In that way, no different to child benefit and working tax credits.

The golf club men had clearly been prosperous in their working lives and so were prosperous in retirement. I remain unconvinced that they - and Stringfellow - are typical oaps. If you've been a minimum wage earner all your life, you must be pretty skint in old age.

I was convinced by the argument that Cameron made a mistake and gave a promise that he shouldn't have. And that the promise that these benefts are safe for the "lifetime of this Parliamnet" is a clear warning that there are cuts for pensioners coming.

OK - one last attempt to clarify that I am not against pensioners taking their share of the cuts. I am - all benefits should go to those that really need them.

What I was objecting to was the attitude by some in the thread that was generalising about greedy pensioners as if it was typical of all pensioners and as if pensioners were all from a generation that had it easy compared to the hardships now faced by younger people.

My post was intended not to set generation against generation but to point out that certainly my war-baby generation did not inhabit some golden period and were unsympathetic and selfish as a generation. As with younger people there are selfish and unselfish amongst us and just as young people must get tired of being labelled as if they were all the same we crumblies also get tired of being labelled simply because of our age.

Well I have managed to watch it now.

I know much of how it comes across must be down to the editing.

The four men do come across as UKIP types really which might be unfair. They are chatting away with the nice man from the telly who is he admits one of them. Their guard is definately down. I wonder what their wives children and grandchildren think! I would be mortified if that 75 yearold (retired 20 years) was my dad. My Ddad would have been nearly 80 now but he died before pension age. It was all from the self-made, didn't I do good male point of view. It's a pity there was nothing much from a woman. They chose a golf club so they could get what they wanted. Fit retired men with plenty of spare time and money. And maybe few drinks inside them.

Also thought they (TV) purposely compared circumstances of these 4 with the city kids who nolonger get EMA. Middle Britain really hated EMA because 'yoof' wasted it on driving lessons or going out. More importantly their own DC didn't get it. Scrapping EMA was a vote winner for the tories and toothless libdems let them do it. I know EMA gave a real boost to less well off rural teens.

IMO these are not typical pensioners.

Prog made Stringfellow look like a very nice chap!