I’m not rich, far from it. I’ve invested in shares, with money left over from the cost-of-living and all its taxes, to build savings, to build my pension pot. Not to get rich, but so I don’t die in penury. So in harder times I’m not reliant on state provision, which one might hope would leave more in that pot for others.
Savings, what I’ve put away for me, if I’m incapacitated or when I get too old (indeed rendered redundant by AI). If my shares are doing well it’s because the companies I invested in have prospered – yes, in part thanks to my investment. Those tax- and wages-paying companies I took a punt on, I risked my money on, to help them, and myself. Quid pro quo.
And the biggest point of discontent that profits the far-right is the lack of housing, how rents and house prices have soared and soared over decades, with ‘immigrants’ blamed but also those dreaded top-hatted landlords who’ve bought up the housing market.
But I remember Labour’s pension raids in the post dot.com 00s spurring many to buy bricks. Many who’d otherwise never thought of it, never would have wanted to, but with their pension pots tipped over, in order to look after themselves in old age, to pay their own and oldies’ care bills, bricks were and are the surest bet.
Where is the new housing? Where is the state stepping in to back the risks we take to secure ourselves? To bolster our wages or actually guaranteeing to provide for us, based on what we’ve paid already? Why does the state get a cut from the investments I risked that enabled others to prosper? Why does the state get a cut of a house’s value it did jack all to do up? To protect us as we age instead of throttling us with state debts – built up by Labour with PFI interest rates and then run up now spectacularly by ransacking Tories skilled at squirrelling their own profits offshore – instead of forcing us to work until we happily put ourselves in the cart to the glue factory. There’s ‘working people’, and there’s ‘working people to death’.
