Ageism,ignorance, intolerance. class bias on mumsnet re Waspi women

[CAJIE]

I did not honestly expect any compensation though I might have hoped. Iwas aware of this change but did not have the chance to make extra provision for it.I do have a professional pension but will have to wait a while longer for the state pension which is extremely challenging.My plans were changed by covid and I doubt I will be employed again except possibly on poor and temporary contracts or gig economy.Secondary school supply on a daily basis has more or less gone.
However what appals me is the attitudes of many mumsnetters who assume that everyone has the abiity to understand pensions and that the Waspi women should have taken so called control of their situation.Maybe some could but there is a hell of a lot of class bias towards the women in lower paid jobs who perhaps were overwhelmed by struggling to survive and did not understand or read the news or the pension changes were not clearly explained to them.Pensions can be hard to understand and provoke anxiety.This appalling prejudice that all older people are rolling in it and this nice habit of some younger women to be sadly quite misogynistic and ageist towards women who are in poverty is very concerning.All sections of society should thrive even in older age and perhaps you younger women should be challenging society, housing costs, the whole ideology of owning a house and actually trying to build something new rather than bitching about what boomers have and their endless cruises etc.
.You are turning against your sex and the comments are cruel and harsh.You know nothing about these womens lives.
Starmer wants to punish older people and older women are always a good target.Your spite about all the things that boomers are supposed to have and you apparently dont is unpleasant.Women beware women.Very sad and against justice.

I think like all debates some take extreme views, 68 year old remain WASPI here.I do think we all have a responsibility to educate ourselves about tax and pensions and there were endless readable articles about the changes ,in the press over the years. A lot of women I know could not be bothered to keep informed or left it to a husband. Many of the poorest women of my age are those who depended on a man and lost out big style in divorce. We have to be as self focused on our financial interests as most men are.

If over 90 per cent knew, compensation for all, is a luxury too far. I never expected any. However the women at the bottom of the financial heap, who really suffered , should be helped. Perhaps those on pension credit should be helped more and the rest of us not? I personally do not feel due to anything and would have passed it on to younger family. I appreciate I am fortunate. There has to be a balance

I don't think younger people understand how open the sexism used to be. I started work straight from school in a factory. All the boys were automatically given higher paid work and the girls lower paid work. You did not apply for a particular post, just to work in the factory, and they decided what post they would offer you. Unemployment was incredibly high, so we took what work we would get.
I did many jobs where there were no employers contributions to pensions. So any pension consisted of only my contributions.
There was ni help with childcare costs at all.

Of course there was an assumption 🙄

I'm 64. I voted Remain, for what that's worth. The majority of people in Scotland did.

Well, as my late husband used to say, they'll be old themselves some day if they're lucky.

Quotes from a UK Parliament Select Committee:

"The economy has become skewed in favour of baby boomers (born 1946-1964) and against millennials (born 1980 - 1995) . Unless governments adapt to these changed circumstances the intergenerational contract that underpins the welfare state is under threat."

"The most recent UK Generational Accounts, published in 2011, estimated the intergenerational budget imbalance to be £7.6 trillion in aggregate terms."

"The 2011 UK Generational Accounts set out future contributions and withdrawals by age group. Without any changes in policy, children currently aged 0–4 would on average contribute around £70,000 more in taxes than they enjoyed in services and benefits. People currently aged 65–69 would on average have a net withdrawal of more than £220,000 over the remainder of their lifetimes."

Personally I'm even more annoyed when older people refuse to accept these simple facts and try to accuse me of ageism or misogyny or sour grapes.

I'm a left wing voter and I don't believe anyone should be in poverty, regardless of age. If there are pensioners who can't afford to put the heating on then that's absolutely wrong and I'm happy to pay my taxes to support them. But a blanket payment to 300,000 women, many of whom are very wealthy? Absolutely not.

I don’t think we should be paying blanket compensation to WASPI women, I’m not vitriolic about it nor am I ageist.

My Waspi mum is furious about this. But in her case I think it's the right decision. She was on benefits, had been for years, and had to wait an extra year to get her pension. That meant she had to pay bedroom tax on her 4 bed council house as she refused to downsize. Once she got her pension she was exempt from bedroom tax.

For her it was a simple as that. She expects compensation for having to pay to hold onto something she doesn't need but won't release for the benefit of a family who need it.

It always seemed bizarre to me that women got their state pension at 60 while men had to wait until 65, given the shorter life expectancy for men and the fact that at that time, more men had back breaking manual jobs such as mining which resulted in health problems long before they reached their retirement age.

I believe that one rationale was that men tended to marry younger women and this meant that they could retire together.

As a Waspi woman myself whose state pension age was increased to 66, I don't think that a blanket compensation scheme could be justified as 90% of women in the relevant age group knew about the pension changes early enough to make provision for this. Unfortunately, this probably means that the 10% who weren't aware of the changes were probably in the sort of jobs without access to company pensions or who left work due to health reasons or caring responsibilities so they have been the hardest hit by these changes.

I don’t really understand why this one group should be compensated for not being able to retire at 60, when most current tax payers will be working to 68+ to claim their own state pensions.

For my age group, I truthfully doubt there will be one, but assume that the retirement age will be over 70 by then.

I am not really clear why these women have been particularly wronged vs every other person coming after them who also has to retire later.

This. 100%. A blanket payment to hundreds of thousands of women, most of whom knew what was happening and for those who didn't - what would they have actually done differently anyway? If they actually gave up work on the idea of a pension without checking the details then they're crazily reckless and if not surely they just need to work longer. You know, like everyone else! It's unbelievably selfish. You would literally be taking that money from younger generations.
Id rather it was invested in schools thanks

I don’t know what to make of it all but recently I was told to “check my privilege” about having a a public sector pension. I would love to have that poster spend one day in my shoes, taking massive decisions about people’s lives all day long at speed, fighting for their rights, making them safe. We live in bizarre times.

@Ritasueandbobtoo9 I’m sure your job is difficult, but you must realise public sector pensions are pretty brilliants compared to those having to build their own private pensions?

Particularly if you’ve been enrolled for many years.

The kinds of pensions new workers today can sign up for are nowhere near as lucrative as in the past - including in the public sector.

Personally I think Labour have got this right.

It's all very well complaining about the terrible misogyny of the past and the limited time women had to make adjustments to their pension arrangements, but does this justify a blanket payment being made to women of a certain age who as a population have enjoyed relative prosperity compared to the younger people who will be funding this payment? This is the stalk reality! It won't be the other boomers losing out but young people who are already struggling to forge any kind of lives for themselves, let alone starting to think about a pension that they won't be able to access until they are 70+.

Women should of course support women but this includes older women not wanting to place yet another burden on struggling younger women that have to face many more challenges than previous generations.

What's terrible is seeing people who are struggling turning against each other.

There's terrible wealth inequality in our country:
The richest 10% of households in the UK own 57% of the country's wealth, while the bottom 50% own less than 5%. The top 1% of households own 23% of the wealth. Yet any politician who even raises the question of how to address this is treated as fringe and unelectable.

Many people are really struggling with the cost of living. Some of those people are farmers, some are pensioners, some are millennials. And many are struggling because of systemic failures of society and government - the selling off of affordable housing; legal tax-avoidance schemes; the looting of once nationalised industries.

The most fundamental inequalities cut through these current identity-politics style divisions. Buying into these classifications and framing the fight and between generations and so on, only serves those who are doing very well under the current system.

Women should of course support women but this includes older women not wanting to place yet another burden on struggling younger women that have to face many more challenges than previous generations

Then they can give the money to a women's charity.

if a wasp woman was born in 1955, for the first 19 years of her working life any occupational pension was not equal to a man’s occupational pension.

it wasn’t until 1990 that this disparity was made illegal

it’s all very well stating oh the had time to put this right, they where still trying to put right a lot of other inequality they were facing

I'm 70 and received my state pension at 66 - six years 'late'. We received many years' notice of this so no surprise but that didn't make it any more palatable, after working for 51 years.

FWIW, I was an ardent remainer, vote Labour and didn't expect to receive compensation.

What's done is done.

What are you talking about? Is this the same idea as giving the winter fuel allowance to millionaires in the hope that they donate it to charity too?

Why on earth would we tax everyone to the hilt and to fund all these blanket payments so that boomers can feel fantastic and benevolent about giving their share to a charity? What about working women that don't need to rely on women's charities but simply want to be able to buy a modest house and pay the bills? Are they just the cash cow in your model that aren't old enough to get blanket payments and aren't poor enough to need charity? What on earth is this country coming to!

I actually despair.

OP Iam with you. I am not a WASPI either.

I actually think Labour have made the right and brave decision here. I don't say that lightly as I'm not a big fan of Starmer.

The country simply cannot afford to pay this money, its as simple as that. Sometimes it comes down to hard choices and this is one of them.

There are much bigger priorities for the country, such as healthcare and education. The UK must make the books balance as a matter of national priority for all its citizens.

It must be disappointing for the Waspi women but its just not realistic to expect this payout at this moment in time.

I also don't like the calls for women to support women just because you're not agreeing with them and the vitriol that accompanies it if you don't. Women are not a homogeneous group, we're all entitled to hold our own opinions and disagree with each other.

You’re quite right OP, women are their own worst enemies sometimes. I don’t know if there’s any research into this…but there should be.

Anecdotally, I’ve seen women rail against other women’s maternity rights at work, I (vaguely) remember how women laughed and insulted ‘dykey’ feminists in the seventies and eighties and there was plenty of female opposition to women getting the vote in the early twentieth century. There are many other examples.

But don’t worry, those women who think all over sixties paid 5 bob for their house in 1977 and retired at 42 will have their own, as yet unknown, battles to fight with the female generations below them.

And the men will continue be quite happy to leave them to it.

Your argument is based on 'fairness' but is a very narrow one. The reality is men and women still aren't equal and life has got fairer in some ways and less far in others for women. House prices, the rising burden of taxation and poor economic growth has meant that many women now will struggle to enjoy anything close to the quality of life that many WASPI women enjoyed. They are guaranteed to retire much later then WASPI women and are expected to save for their retirement whilst also paying extortionate mortgages for many more years, paying towards their children's astronomical tuition fees and with a much higher tax burden than generations of the past.

So were pension arrangements in the past completely fair to women compared to men? No. Does this mean younger women struggling with their own challenges should be forced to pay towards righting this wrong at their own expense? Absolutely not.

Maybe. But they seemed very much in favour of this pre election.

Of course they were, but when it's your job to actually make the books balance it's a very different story. You have to make hard decisions once you've got the full picture.

The country simply cannot afford this payout at this point.