A Call to ARMs Members

The ARMs National Committee has been sent a request from the General Secretary's office to find an ARMs member who would be willing to be interviewed by French media on being made redundant in the Civil Service.

Is this you?

If you have recently been made redundant and would be interested in finding out more, please contact Steve Battlemuch, the press officer, on steveb@pcs.org.uk with your details. The interview can be completely anonymous.

If you can help it would be appreciated.

How do we bridge the Generation Gap?

If you believe some media commentators and politicians the 'Generational Divide' is the most corrosive issue in our society. They say wealthy Baby Boomer pensioners have swallowed up all the wealth whist younger generations struggle with student debts, lowly paid jobs and inadequate housing.

The media often characterises pensioners as playing golf on lush courses or enjoying luxury cruises without a care in the world. I find it strange I don’t know one such person. However I do know older people who struggle with their health either through age, disability, loneliness, isolation and of course poverty. I also know young people who worry about their education and whether they or their family can afford it. I know many more who struggle to find a decent job with reasonable working conditions and pay and who are exploited by employers without an effective regulatory system to safeguard their rights and many without a union to fight for them.

With all this in mind it is heartening to see a more constructive analysis of the issues that can and should be tackled. It is also of interest how uniting across our generations might start to challenge the real inequality in our society between the vested interests a rich, powerful global elite, its hangers on and the rest of us. It is worth taking a moment to read the article here, and why not share your views in the comments box below this post?

Eddie Spence

ARMS National Vice Chair

A woman in your 60s affected by changes in retirement age?

Women aged between 60 and 62 are an average of £32 a week worse off due to changes in the state pension age. The Guardian Newspaper would like to find out how this affects you.

Women in their early 60s have lost an average of £32 a week from changes in the retirement age, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) reported today.

The increase in the age that women can receive their state pension has lowered the income of more than a million women, according to the IFS study, while the government has saved £5.1bn a year.

Many women are working for longer as a result of the changes and some are now facing hardship after many years of work and paying National Insurance Contributions with the expectation of an earlier State Pension, an expectation which will bring the state pension age to an equal level - 65 - for men and women by November 2018, before rising to 66 by October 2020.

PCS ARMs is supporting the 'WASPI Campaign' to address this injustice but we need to keep it in the public eye and expose what the Government has done and their refusal to properly address this injustice. You can help by telling your story or letting a family member, friend or neighbour know about this continuing campaign.

Are you a woman aged between 60 and 62 affected by the changes? Are you struggling financially? Have you decided to work for longer? How has this affected your life?
Share your experiences:

The Guardian Newspaper would like to hear from women in their early 60s affected by the change in state pension age. If you would like to share your experience, please fill in the form at this link, anonymously if you prefer. The Guardian will feature some of your responses in their reporting.

Tory Government continues to use Social Care as a political football

Apparently having learned nothing from their car crash of an Election Manifesto the Tories now have a new plan to improve social care.

After reducing funding on social care by £4.6 Billion since 2010 particularly through the cuts in Local Authority Budgets, the new plan is to get the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to inspect the failing and underfunded social care system. If the arrangements are found to be unsatisfactory the Government can impose a financial penalty on the relevant Local Authority rather than allow it to access funding from the Governments ‘Better Care Fund’ into which they have invested £2billion – just £2.6Billion short of the money they have taken out of social care funding.

This approach is being championed by none other than NHS saviour Jeremy Hunt. ‘Simples’ the answer was staring us in the face all along? Even Tory cheerleader the Daily Telegraph is struggling to get its head around this latest panic measure - read more here.

Eddie Spence
ARMS

Turning Of The Tide?

Now that the election campaign has started and Labour’s policies are finally beginning to get more media coverage, is public opinion beginning to shift in their favour? A Times/YouGov poll published this week already bucks the media predictions of an inexorable swing towards the Tories - and we are only a week into the campaign. I’m not holding my breath but it will be interesting to see how many other media sources (I have only seen it in the Independent on 27th April) publish this poll’s findings, which embarrassingly don’t fit their analysis that Labour has no chance of winning power.

I have said before that I believe one of the main reasons for Labour’s poor poll ratings has been the media’s (including the hitherto Labour-supporting media) obsession with reporting the party’s factional infighting, rather than its policies. But general election reporting standards require that all the main parties now get proper coverage to enable voters to make a properly informed choice, and the more Labour’s message gets across, the more people will be able to see that they, not the Tories, have the policies that will help ordinary working families.

I expect that distinction to sharpen once the party manifestos are published because the Tories will have to find a way of showing in print exactly how they plan to fulfil May’s hollow claim that they are now the party of ordinary working families. Since she became PM, she has done absolutely nothing to back up those easy, glib words but her manifesto team now faces the uphill task of converting a meaningless soundbite that the Tories privately don’t believe into a published action plan that they know will be examined more forensically than May’s snippets of verbal propaganda have been.

The Tories may try to console themselves by dismissing this poll as a rogue result but they will be a lot more worried by another YouGov poll published alongside it that shows a considerable shift of public opinion away from Brexit (only 43% now supporting it compared to 52% in the EU referendum). If voters really are beginning to reassess the merits of a hard Brexit now that some of its unpalatable realities, rather than the referendum campaign deceptions, have had to be acknowledged by May’s ministers then that could put a very different complexion on this election in the very seats that May (and UKIP) gambled on winning - i.e. those where a ‘remain’ Labour MP’s constituents voted for Brexit. The last thing May will want to see is evidence that those voters are revising their previous support for a hard Brexit and possibly moving closer to Labour - particularly when she intends to make Brexit her main election pitch.

That much-vaunted Tory landslide is beginning to look a lot less certain than the establishment would have us believe. If this poll turns out to be correct and public opinion is already starting to shift in Labour’s direction with still another six weeks to go before polling day, May could soon be wondering if she will finish up with a smaller majority than she has now, or possibly none at all.

The article in the Independent is here.

Brian Nelson
ARMs Yorkshire and Humberside region

Recent articles from the internet

The following are recent articles you may find of some interest, selected by Eddie Spence:

• General election 2017: parties must be clear how they will solve social care crisis - here.

• Hammond and May must not allow Labour to scare them off unpicking the pension triple lock - here.

• Labour promises to maintain triple lock state pension guarantee until 2025 if it wins power - here.

• Labour unveils four-point pensioners' pledge card - here.

• Hargreaves warns of '1980s'-style pension mis-selling scandal - here.

• Working past aged 68 'too much for people to bear' - here.