WASPI Women Denied Compensation

[Rusty Nails]

E's and my mothers were in a similar situation. Both, in different ways, rather resented the role they were expected to play.

As an office cleaner and factory worker with no prospects of doing any other work in the future my mother never resented it, in fact she thought it was a welcome break from the dirty, low paid work she was doing, and which she went back to when her kids were older.

But that was in the bad old prehistoric days and the world has improved since then, and we are all middle class now with wonderful career prospects.

 

[Psamathe]

(Not that Conservatives are much better).

(Not that Conservatives are much better).

Fixed that for you.

(Going a bit off-topic but) I heard Ms Badenoch interviewed on the radio this morning and I can't see her lasting until the next election. She came across basically as useless (I'm being polite here). She can't see that whilst she sits around doing nothing and with no policies,Mr Farange is getting loads more press, growing support.

I feel that people and politics don't readily change their minds so eg move into low ratings and it becomes very hard to climb out of that hole. Similarly, Mr Farangee turns peoples' opinions to Reform and they will be resistant to change back. With politics people seem resistant to changing their views and once changed are resistant to changing back. Faragee's efforts and Ms Badenoch lack of efforts and Mr Starmer's incapabilities will likely prove very difficult for each to turn-around later.

Which these days would leave me very much in the "none of the above" were it not that constituency I'm in went from "safe Conservative" to Green last General Election ...

Ian

 

[theclaud]

Unfortunately when you got the keys, went into the lounge and got the floorboards lifted to so some much needed renovation you discovered a massive sinkhole under the house.

Liz Truss was the sinkhole.

If you've swallowed the schtick about the surprise black hole, I've got a bridge you might be interested in...

 

[theclaud]

You chose a funny way of expressing that!

Not really. I was just gently questioning a loaded term that I suspected appeared perfectly neutral to the person using it. It's a way of asking people to unpack things a bit more. There's no need to get twisty-knickered on anyone's behalf.

 

[theclaud]

My anecdotal impression (from talking to others) is that public support for WASPI is not high, certainly not when there are other very justifiable compensations that still seem to be faltering eg Post Office Sub-postmasters, Infected Blood, nuclear trials veterans

I think you're probably right about this, but I think has less to do with justice and fairness than with the divisive power of Austerity logic. Well, that and the fact that people are apt to bridle at the suggestion that they might have been the beneficiaries of historical gender inequality...

 

[multitool]

There's no need to get twisty-knickered on anyone's behalf.

I'm getting the strong feeling that this is Matticus's entire raison d'être 😉

Has anyone ever met him? Does he exist or is he some sort of rudimentary AI VicariousConcernBot?

 

[Ian H]

I'm getting the strong feeling that this is Matticus's entire raison d'être 😉

Has anyone ever met him? Does he exist or is he some sort of rudimentary AI VicariousConcernBot?

I have met him and can confirm that he doesn't actually exist

 

[icowden]

If you've swallowed the schtick about the surprise black hole, I've got a bridge you might be interested in...

Well if it is "schtick" then it's taken in the OBR most of the united press and a good amount of the population.

I also feel it's pretty accurate to point out that if the Conservative party hadn't lost 30 to 60bn under Truss, 39Bn on Test and Trace etc we might have the money for the WASPI women and winter fuel allowances.

This is quite a good breakdown of the estimated 131bn wasted under the last Conservative Government

https://assets.nationbuilder.com/b4...ous_spending_tracker_Breakdown.pdf?1717161531

 

[Bromptonaut]

On the down side - I was under the impression that once I had worked for x years then I was entitled to a full pension at 66

I am pretty sure I also got a letter saying this - or so I interpreted it at the time - the time being about 2005-2010 ish

The change that's possibly caught you, and would have had me if after leaving a 35year career in the Civil Service I wasn't still in part time employment, is the reform of pensions in 2016.

The full pension as of today is £221.20 as opposed to c£160 in the previous scheme.

If you were contracted out of the second state pension, SERPS etc, because of paying into a company pension then, AIUI, years prior to 2016, may not count in full for the new pension.

If you go on line and check you can see how you're affected and whether you might want to think about buying in NI for missed years.

 

[BoldonLad]

It's not how many years you have worked but how many years you have paid National Insurance, to get the new state pension you have to have paid 35 years of national insurance if you have paid in less than 35 years you get less. I retired at 55 having paid 37 years of NI and having never opted out will get a full state pension according to my pension forecast, my wife on the other hand like many of our generation did not work for a lot of her working life preferring to bring up our children and only returned to work later in life, her NI contributions were made up of years she had worked and paid NI and pension credit for bringing up our children. This still left her short of the full pension so we paid the gaps in her contributions to ensure she gets a full pension.
You can check your pension forecast here. https://www.gov.uk/check-state-pension you need to sign up for an account if you don't already have one.

IMO it's your responsibility to check these sort of things, it's not like the information is not there you just have to access it.

Not an expert, but, I thought there was NI credits given for home care “duties”?

 

[tarric]

Not an expert, but, I thought there was NI credits given for home care “duties”?

Hence why I said "pension credit for bringing up our children"

 

[BoldonLad]

Hence why I said "pension credit for bringing up our children"

So you did, my poor skim reading

 

[Mr Celine]

Hence why I said "pension credit for bringing up our children"

I think you mean Home Responsibilities Protection, which is similar to National Insurance credits.

Pension Credit is a means-tested benefit for claimants over state pension age.

 

[tarric]

I think you mean Home Responsibilities Protection, which is similar to National Insurance credits.

Pension Credit is a means-tested benefit for claimants over state pension age.

Sorry couldn't be bothered to look up the official name but I'm sure most would of understood what I meant.

 

[dutchguylivingintheuk]

None of that makes sense. You do realise that Farage is not a Conservative MP?

Yes, I knew that, i gave the example as Farage because poeple vote for hIm for his name first and his policies second.
That's why he scored with the Ukip too at the time. As soon as he jumped ship Ukip plummeted and surely there might be some additional factors but still.

He ended up with lots of votes because people didn't want to vote Conservative. People therefore chose either the person most likely to win in their area or an extremist group. In either eventuality, every vote for an extremist who couldn't win ended up being a vote for the person most likely to win against the Tory candidate by ensuring that the Tory got fewer votes.

I'm pretty sure tht if you look as those voted impact researches that Farage is very high in those rankings and that Farage joining any party has already and certain Farage effect on it's own. And yes of course it helped Farage looked at the thinks tory voters are discontent with and put those points in his programme.
Does not take away that the likes of Farage, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton all have a certain appeal to voters no matter whom they would be backing.

In my constituency John Copy (Tory) got 16,312 votes. If Reform hadn't stood he would likely have got 21,000 votes. Still not enough to beat the LIb Dem who got 28,315 votes but very few voted for Starmer's Labour party (1396 votes). What we saw across the country was not Labour votes rising but people who would have voted Tory voting for Reform, thus making it easier for more liberal candidates to win.

As a second illustration consider Spelthorne. Lincoln Jopp (Tory) won with 14,038 votes. Labour came second with 12,448. However Labour would have won if the LIb Dems had stood down as they took 8,710 votes. Meanwhile Jopp's win would have been far less marginal if Reform hadn't taken 8,284 votes away from the Tories. If you look at the 2019 numbers, the Conservatives took 29,141 votes and Labour 10,748. So a very small increase of 2000 votes for Labour. Lb Dems had 7499 votes so a small increase for the Lib Dems. Reform didn't stand.

Which to me shows the system not really working, because of people vote Reform, green or whatever isn't one of the two main contenders, they did not vote their the two main contenders are so if one of the other contenders drops out their votes should be nullified in my view.

Imagine you bought a house. You made lots of promises about what you would do when you moved in. Unfortunately when you got the keys, went into the lounge and got the floorboards lifted to so some much needed renovation you discovered a massive sinkhole under the house.

In which case there are laws and legal proceedings that can help me get justice compensation, unless the court rules i should have seen it.

Liz Truss was the sinkhole. The Conservatives deliberately hid figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility. In our analogy the sinkhole carefully hidden from the surveyor. Reeves had no idea that there was a massive finance hole until the day she took the role as Chancellor. All the pre-job briefings had hidden it.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-hunt-treasury-black-hole-budget-b2641914.html

I remember the Tories saying similar things when they took over from Labour last time, hell they even used it again this election. But similar as in our house example above there should be consequences for any chancellor who does things like this to deliberately hide documents financial blackholes etc.

The Conservatives deliberately broke the law to hide the black hole. Thus Labour is having to row back on promises. I'm no fan of Reeves but I can understand why the Government is unable to fulfil promises and is having to make some hard financial decisions. Some of them (e.g. winter fuel payments) could have been done better of course.

Then the Conservatives should be held accountable because now it just seems to be a game when the conversatives win, they claim labour farked up the last budget when labour wins its the other way around. And the people? they are scr*wed over anyway, and then they wonder why so many people don't trust politics. They all claim to be there for the people but time and time again they turn out to be for themselves.

Still not committing to a promise you made for years is a choice, and it's is my point that it is not a very good one. It would have been better if they took the money from the list of very rich Tory sponsors for example.