Would you vote for Labour/Getting rid of Triple Lock at the next general election?

[mybiggreenfrog]

Yes (YABU)
No (YANBU)

No, but I’d never vote labour in a million years.

Oh I did notice - remind me if Labour had to navigate covid and war in Ukraine?

I think the current war in Iran is child's play comparing to impacts that covid and Ukraine had on economy.

And why late 2022 by the way? not summer 2024?

This exactly actually, and adding the ridiculous NI raise, which has had a negative effect on jobs and things such as nursery fees.

No I think there was a terror of being labelled the nasty party again. Theresa May did them a bad turn. Anything like that can only be achieved by the left in my view.

Wrong.

The state pension won't shrink away. It'll still go up by the higher of inflation or 2.5%. So in low-inflation years (you know, the ones when the US isn't starting wars in the Middle East) it'll be growing above inflation.

We were going to be hit anyway. The state pension is a Ponzi scheme and therefore doomed to collapse as the population of dependants grows and contributors shrink. These reforms will soften the blow slightly.

Post of the thread 😆 😆 🤣 😂 😹

I think there’s a fair bit of “thing I don’t like = Labour caused it” going on here.
Frozen tax thresholds? Sunak introduced them, Hunt extended them, and Labour extended them again. Council tax was rising well before Labour got in. Rents were already through the roof before the renters’ reforms, so “renters’ rights caused high rents” is doing a lot of work without much evidence.
And yes, the labour market has weakened and employer NI won’t have helped. But recruitment hasn’t literally “frozen” and redundancies aren’t universally surging.

There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of Labour. But the original point was that people beyond union members and families.

Do you think other countries will provide your children with a better state pension without the country having a similarly huge debt?

or are you just bothered that they might be paying taxes to fund people who through disability or ill health take more from the state than they give?

Theres been a huge rise in unemployment for the young under Labour. Since Rachel Reeves's budget. Which was completely foreseeable.

No, which probably makes me a hypocrite. But the nhs has been funded since the 1940's, so is already in the budget. It is also open to everyone from birth and children don't have the opportunity to earn money to pay for services. There is already free care provided for those with under £23k in assets.

What Andy is suggesting is a new and expensive service for people near end of life. The only thing they are likely to do with their assets at that point is leave them to their children, yet he is asking people who may never be able to afford their own house to co fund it instead. In an ideal world, all social care would be free, but that can't happen without vastly higher taxes from an increasingly smaller pool of working age adults.

I'm broadly in favour of the policy. It increases the odds that I'll vote Labour at the next election. But my decision will be based on the basket of policies each party offers, not on one individual policy.

According to the Resolution Foundation it’s exactly the same as in early 2024.

@TheolittleI think other countries tax less so people can save more into a pension and not rely on a state one. You can’t really rely on a state one here either, but tax will be high.
My children have two passports so should be okay. But having said that a lot of people have left in recent years without two passports to work in other countries out of friends, colleagues, clients etc. They’ve done it by applying for visas

Im sure this was discussed on here at the time. They discounted those not actively seeking work in the unemployment figures.

Unemployment in 16-24 year olds has risen to over 16%, an 11 year high, and forecast to rise to 800,000 by next year. Employers blame Rachel's budget.

Where do those figures come from?

ONS and BCC figures.

I think the fairest thing would be for the Government to define a basic pension amount that everyone could live on. This would be reviewed & increased every year.

If you are in receipt of a private pension less than that, then it would be topped up to the specified amount by your state pension (if you had paid NI).

If you had no private pension, then it would all be paid out of the state pension pot.

If you had a very good private pension, then you would need no top up from the state pension pot .

I propose this, knowing how much tax people have legally avoided by paying more into their private pensions. It seems much fairer this way.

And in the future? Because I can't see low to mid income people putting money into a personal pension if they know they can have the money now and the same pension (all state) when they retire.

A beautiful article here

At least Burnham doesn’t pretend to care about growth

" What is there to be said for Burnham? At least he does not pretend to care about growth. There is a refreshing candour about his indifference to this (admittedly paramount) issue. Sir Keir Starmer felt the need to pretend, which led to extreme disillusion when he raised taxes and red tape on business.

Burnham is a fairly honest stagnation-ist. Until such time as Britain suffers an acute economic crisis, he would rather pursue left-liberal aims than growth, which might after all entail deregulation and other forays outside his comfort zone. Besides social care, a big item in his speech in Liverpool on Tuesday was reform of Britain’s majoritarian voting model. A man who spends scarce time and political capital on this while his country borrows more expensively than Greece is letting you know who he is. Even when he argued for unpicking Brexit, he framed it as a means of controlling immigration as much as a spur to trade."

"So welcome the new candour. A Labour government exists to steer cash to its own people until the economic waters close over it. Burnham, unlike Starmer, hardly pretends otherwise."

So back to OP's question - no, I'm not voting Labour. (Well, unless it's the only choice to keep Reform off)

Great summary from the FT!

The ONS says this. It’s a bit different.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotinwork/unemployment/bulletins/youngpeoplenotineducationemploymentortrainingneet/may2026

There would still be tax advantages to using the pension as a savings/investment mechanism

Especially it's subject to IHT now.

Again and again and again the entire discussion is how to redistribute, not how to make economy grow and how to make vast numbers of idle working age people to contribute.

YES to OP but ... the tax rises needed to pay for the social care service means that Labour will be voted out, is only obvious way this situation goes. For all the moaning about social care problems, most people are fine with status quo which means they won't pay to solve the problem and they can tolerate the social care shortage to continue, fine if leopards eat other people's faces.

Reform is promising that if you bash enough immigrants that will pay for unicorn kitten fairies (and even social care) so they'll get in with narrow majority next time and then promptly fail on all promises (except for the one about being utter bastards towards immigrants).

And it's what people will insist they wanted, that they knew what they voted for.

Is everything I am predicting

not really.

As PPs mentioned earlier, the loss of state pension is 250-300k impact over life time. This is without annual increases. It's a huge amount.

If you're mid- or higher earner it makes sense for you to save in pension for tax reasons. But given that 0.5m will be taken from you at the end, it will make much more sense just to reduce your hours and not take any promotions and have a better work life balance.
Even comrade Rachel accepted that it's a bad idea.