On Cameron and Pensions

Here’s David Cameron in the London Evening Standard, insisting that the new public sector pension proposals in Lord Hutton’s review are “fair”, and a “good deal”. He’s wrong.

Mr Cameron, addressing the annual conference of the Local Government Group in Birmingham, said reform was “essential”, warning that the pension system was in danger of “going broke” unless action was taken because people were living much longer.

If the public pension system is funded by the government (which it is), then the only way it can “go broke” is if the government refuses to fund it properly. It’s entirely in their hands. If Cameron was quoted in the Times tomorrow saying we were in danger of declaring war on Guinea Bissau, it would be no more ridiculous. It’s like someone telling their children their pocket money fund is in danger of going broke and they’d better do more chores or it will become unviable to pay them at all.

At least he admitted that gold-plated public pensions are a tiny exception to the norm. Almost half of all public service pensions are worth less than £6k a year, the article notes.

The balance between what public sector employees paid into their pensions and what the taxpayer contributed was getting “massively out of kilter”, said the Prime Minister.

Civil servants contribute around 1.5% and 3.5% towards their pension, compared with 19% from taxpayers, while taxpayers paid the equivalent of £1,000 per household towards maintaining public sector pensions, which Mr Cameron said was not fair.

This is the part that’s got me really annoyed. Mainly because it overlooks the fact that PUBLIC SECTOR EMPLOYEES PAY TAX. Quite a bit, actually. So to draw a line between public employees and taxpayers is stupid. It’s like pointing out that all car owners are subsidising drivers of yellow cars, when those drivers (whose only crime is questionable taste) pay road tax, etc. too. It’s an utterly false dichotomy, but one that seems to be increasingly popular.

I was talking to my father (who is a public employee) last night, and he pointed out that public sector workers have always earned less than their counterparts in equivalent jobs in the private sector, with the understanding that their pensions would be better and more secure. “I look forward to getting that as back-pay,” he quipped.

The argument that private sector pensions are terrible is no defence either. Standards of public pension provision should be the benchmark, not another contender in the race to the bottom, born of companies’ unwillingness to pay money to anyone not still contributing to their bottom line.

Ultimately, the decision not to fund the existing pension scheme is a choice, just as it was a choice to spend what is already a cool £300 million on intervention in Libya while cutting funding elsewhere, and to slash corporation tax while raising VAT.

There Is No Alternative?

Don’t You Believe It.

My Response to the Bailey Review

The Bailey Review, ‘Letting Children be Children – Report of an Independent Review of the Commercialisation and Sexualisation of Childhood‘ was published today. The link there is to the downloadable review and its appendices, in PDF format. First, I must acknowledge my debt to Dr. Petra, whose post neatly summarises many of my concerns and highlights issues with the report.

The foreword (by Reg Bailey) says, “We live in a society that is changing at what is, for many, a bewildering rate.” The review is supposed to explore whether this change is damaging children’s childhood and altering detrimentally the experience of growing up. Judging whether the societal changes that so bewilder adults are similarly confusing for children is extremely difficult, and I recognise that the review has a very tough brief in this respect.

My primary fear before reading the report was that it would merely peddle moral panic, instead of analysing the data properly. There appears to be an element of moral panic in the data, with concerns of parents about, for example, the watershed in large font, while the stats show that only 9% of parents want the time of the watershed moved (pp. 28-9).

Page 42 of the report specifically mentions “bras (padded or not)” as a symptom of this increased sexualisation, along with a list of female clothing such as high heels, short skirts and bikinis, rolling this into the misguided concept that these types of clothing will somehow encourage paedophilia. This links further into victim-blaming in cases of rape and sexual assault. One questions whether this is about protecting young girls, or about perpetuating the fear of female sexuality and ownership thereof. After all, the report doesn’t mention the growing sexualisation of teenage boys in celebrity culture. Is imposing ‘moral standards’ on young girls actually in the interest of promoting the virgin/whore dichotomy of female sexuality, where a woman is either completely chaste or a ‘slut’. Seeing sexually unavailable young girls in ‘sexual’ clothing interferes with the narrative that women are either prudish and covered up or gagging for it, baring their flesh. Furthermore, the existence of bras for children is nothing new, as this advertisement from 1959 shows.

Page 43 of the report:

The parents who contributed to the Review clearly wanted their own children to have the space and time to grow and develop mentally, physically and emotionally as individuals, learning how to navigate the world at their own pace and in their own unique way. We found a commonly-held view among respondents that sexualisation accelerates that process in a way that parents do not like, and that some parents worry could be harmful.

How on earth can children be expected to “grow and develop as individuals”, when they interact with other children daily and form their expectations of what is acceptable and expected of them via this medium. From a young age, the influence of one’s peers is as important or more important than the influence of parents. That parents feel uncomfortable about this isn’t surprising, but I argue this is a fear we should not pander to if the price is isolating and imposing morality on children from afar. The emergence of teenagers in the 60s and 70s was protrayed as tearing apart the fabric of society, while now we all accept teenagers’ role as prominent consumers and ‘early-adopters’ of societal change.

Throughout the report, I got the sense that concerns were being overplayed, with consistent use of large font to display parents’ concerns, with related stats showing these were minority views given less prominence. Given that the report was written the chairman of Christian group Mothers’ Union, this doesn’t surprise me at all. The almost total focus on young girls as victims of sexualisation is another major flaw of the report. It reads as yet another brick in the wall of this Conservative-led government’s determination to shield young women from their own sexuality ‘for their own good’ – a charge led by Nadine Dorries and her bonkers cohort from the Conservative Christian Fellowship.