Nick Robinson on the Today programme said that people affected by withdrawing the Winter Fuel Allowance were "the wartime generation". AIBU to think he's wrong?

[HauntedBungalow]

Also, I am genuinely bored of this British obsession with referencing World War II when talking about unrelated random subjects.

World War II ended 80 years ago. The "wartime generation" don't need a Winter Fuel Allowance because they're all already dead, barring the odd 97 year old who is still living at home and paying all bills themselves.

More likely Status Quo and Led Zeppelin by then!

Shortly before the first Covid lockdown a group of pensioners in a cafe near me were grumbling about what a fuss it all was.

'Especially when you've been through the war,' remarked the waitress.

They were all mortally offended, having been born during WW2 and far too young to remember any of it.

My mum was born in July 1945 and I consider her the post-war generation, she didn´t have bombs falling on her head or V-2 rockets for that matter. My grandmother is the wartime generation, she´s been dead 25 years.

Anyone aged 80 or over is the wartime generation. There are lots of people alive aged 80 and over.

Not true - you need 30 years of national insurance contributions to get state pension so you have to have worked

Surely the wartime generation are people who were alive during the second world war. It has nothing to do with whether or not they fought in the war. My grandfathers who are both long dead didn’t fight because one was a farmer and one a miner. Are you saying they aren’t wartime generation too?

i think referring to the wartime generation is just an easy way to refer to older pensioners i.e. the over 80’s.

@DinosaurMunch

That isn’t true.

How many years NI depends on when you were born. Historically it used to be 9/10ths of 44 years for women and 49 for men. It then changed to 30 years.

From 1 April 2016 it is 35 years, but if prior to this you were contracted out it can be more years.

The years NI can be based on NI credits which you get for claiming some benefits. So someone who has “signed on” all of their working life can get a full state pension having never worked!

@StoneofDestiny if you were on NMW (or less, prior to its introduction) you may only get the basic state pension. You can have worked all your life and have no private pension because you were a low earner. Far less likely for people working now, but for a 90 year old woman who retired at 60 in 1994 they spent most of their working life in a very different age.

Isn’t that simply the number of people who died? Even if we ploughed 100% of everyone’s taxes into the NHS it is not possible to keep people alive forever.

Almost 14,000 people died needlessly last year in England while waiting in A&E for up to 12 hours a new estimate suggests
Calculations by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) based on a large study of excess deaths and waiting times show that 268 people are likely to have died each week in 2023 because of excessive waits in emergency departments

Now what i don't get and btw i don't support the cut to WFA, is why all these people who are lining up to criticise Labour and tell us all how many people will die, have zilch to say about these AE deaths, which have been reported on for at least 2 years!!

Many of these poor people will be the elderly.

And that's why. They'll be the wonderful milllenials and gen X & Z who are the glorious future of our country and are happy to see the back of those awful boomers.

[ who fought for and won so many of the rights they enjoy, but hey. Details.]

/no, I didn't vote Tory , or Labour for that matter ,so pack it in.

Course not. Come on, they ARE those people and it will all go mysteriously quiet.
If they were honest they'd openly tell their own parents etc that they despise them and wish they were dead. But they prefer a sweeping statement that they imagine absolves them of doing that.

No one should despise anyone, walking past the AE dept at my local hospital and seeing all the ambulances queuing up and the staff from inside running out to treat, mostly elderly people, in the ambulances when they should be inside getting specialist treatment, is shameful.

My point is why is one terrible but another is perfectly ok and courts no criticism?

True. My late DH was employed very patchily, having spent most of his life self-employed and also been a crofter on Shetland, and latterly as a writer, for which he did not get paid much. This affected his pension and he did not expect to receive very much, but had accumulated 30 years of contributions one way or another, so had slightly more than a basic pension. None of his employment had carried a private pension except possibly his stint as a Youth Worker, but he left too young to have a pension from it (and it was not that well paid he could afford to fund a pension himself).
To suggest, however, that he did not work or pay NI is a canard though for some of his life he had a disability pension (cut off under Labour) because he had been severely injured when a crofter (attacked by a cow) and could neither stand nor sit for long periods and could not lift more than a child's plastic spade when he wanted to do some gardening.
Some very judgemental people on here!