The furor about state compensation for 1950s women over supposedly lost pension entitlements is dying down. Now it seems to be confined to a few die-hards on Twitter and oven those cases are attracting less and less interest. Here are a few thoughts on the matter.
Since 1944 women have received their state pension 5 years earlier than men despite living longer and not making commensurately greater National Insurance (NI) contributions. This was manifestly unfair and to comply with European Law that compels equality between the sexes, the UK had to equalise the state pension ages of men and women. It is not surprising given the demographic changes that are underway and the state of the economy, that the Government chose to do this by increasing the state pension age (SPA) of women rather than reducing that of men. It was also understandable that the first generation affected by this, women born in the 1950s, should feel some regret at losing something previous generations received without question. I suspect, for most women that was about as deep as it went and the ones I know ( I am a 50s man) acknowledged that the change was overdue and that they had known about it for years, allowing ample time to plan ahead.
A movement has grown called the WASPIs which stands for ‘Women Against State Pension Inequality.’ However, what they are actually protesting about is state pension equality, an irony that appears to be lost on them. Because feminism is the dominant ideology in the media and academia, the claims of the WASPIs have gained undue salience and insufficient critical examination. Ultimately, this was to their detriment and it is possible that a small number of women with legitimate grievances have lost out. However, this was attributable to the greed of many WASPIs who were demanding full restitution for any pension lost as a result of the change in SPA. In fact, many went further than that, WASPIs were being advised to seek compensation for ‘The amount of pension you lost per week x by the number of weeks it’s delayed and take into account anything else you might have lost eg interest on savings if you’re living on those. For those who have had to sell homes and downsize then fees incurred with that’. It was estimated that compensation along the lines argued by the WASPIs would have cost the state, and ultimately younger workers, up to £58 billion.
Giving in to the WASPIs would have amounted to kicking the can down the road, had the Government caved into 50s women we could be sure that a campaign on behalf of 60s women would have followed -and so on. Indeed, there was a splinter group of the WASPIs, ‘Backto60’ who were demanding just that, a return across the board to special and unpaid-for privileges for women. They took their case to judicial review and, not surprisingly, lost. Furthermore, the court of appeal concluded that the changes in SPA were not motivated by sexism or age discrimination and that the Government did not have a legal obligation to inform women of those changes. WASPIs keep very quiet about this judgement.
A big part of the WASPI claim is that they didn’t know about impending changes to SPA and this was due to a failure of the Department for Work and Pensions to write to women sufficiently early, notifying them of these changes. In most cases, I find a lack of knowledge hard to believe. I had certainly known about it for over 10 years and remember the matter being discussed on financial programs such as Money Box on BBC Radio 4. There is evidence that most 50s women did know about the impending changes. However, the finger of blame for a lack of knowledge about changes to SPA and poor understanding of pensions, in general, must be spread more widely than the DWP. There are numerous women’s advocacy groups and many of those are tax-payer funded, Women’s Aid for example. The media is dominated by feminist journalists and there are women-only publications and programs specifically targeting women on the radio and television. Over the last 10 years, there have been numerous feminist moral panics whipped up by these people and it is clear they have no difficulty getting their grievances into the public arena. So why didn’t the same voices do more to educate women about the nature of the state pension? Not just the impending changes, but the nature of the state pension, there is no pot of money with a contributor’s name on it, instead it is a benefit paid for from the NI contributions of existing workers. Perhaps those voices are not really interested in helping women and their primary aim is to demonise men and drive a wedge between the sexes. (A familiar story – see blogpost How Feminism Harms Women)
Another important plank of the WASPI campaign was the judgement of the Parliamentary and Health Services Ombudsman who agreed that there had been maladministration by the DWP in not writing to affected women. However, the PHSO was not adjudicating whether there should be the full restitution WASPIs were asking for. The most the PHSO could recommend would be a few thousand pounds and even that means tested and only for those with good reason for not being aware of the changes. It was not the victory the WASPIs held it out to be.
Another failure of the WASPIs was the cases they chose to foreground in the media. Mostly well-heeled workers who would already have index-linked occupational pensions. It was a display of crass insensitivity that had my younger relatives, who can’t hope to enjoy these pension benefits, throwing things at the television. Going further, because feminist issues tend to get a sympathetic hearing their grievances achieved undue salience, and that led them to believe there was more public support for their cause than there was. Because the WASPI claims were not adequately scrutinised and challenged they mounted a poorly focussed campaign that lumped together the understandable disappointments of some affluent women with index-linked occupational pensions with a smaller number of women for whom it may have been a problem, though even then deserving of compensation? Perhaps not.
Given our greater longevity, it is unfair to expect younger generations to fund longer retirement for both men and women. It would be (another) intergenerational unfairness to leave SPA unchanged and support the WASPI campaign. Those mostly left-leaning MPs who have supported their campaign would do well to remember that giving in to them would at best be a zero sum game and any votes gained from older female voters would be offset by younger voters, male and female, who would rightly resent paying higher contributions to fund unmerited compensation for WASPIs.
toxic feminism 