When president Macron had the temerity to suggest that the state pension age should increase from 62 to 64, he was met with a wave of protests. He eventually got the legislation onto the statute book in 2023 but implementation is proving problematic.
Reducing welfare benefits is never easy, as Keir Starmer recently found out. But governments cannot survive indefinitely by letting the electorate believe that state largesse can flow indefinitely.
That conviction seemed to prevail in Greece until the financial crisis of 2008 exposed the full grimness of its economic situation. An unusually generous attitude to pensions was a major contributor. Industrial injuries justifying retirement as early as 50 could be claimed by workers ranging from hairdressers to trumpeters.
The arrival of the rescue squad from the European Central Bank put a stop to such profligacy. The price of its bailout was that austerity hit Greece. The desire for a relatively easy life is hardly unusual and it requires a brave and determined government to confront it.
This is no revelation. Published in 1954, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies presented a graphic vision of how societies could implode. A group of schoolboys stranded on a desert island crown their leader – Ralph. But as he tries to govern, his peers become increasingly lazy and disloyal, refusing to accept Ralph’s insistence that their lifestyle cannot be sustained.
We might see today’s electorates as more sophisticated than Golding’s boys, but it is still true that people do not like decisions that they view as restrictive. A fickle public prepared to turn against any government that fails to make their lives easier is a difficult background against which politicians are asked to make decisions. The reaction to the now largely postponed benefit reforms proposed by the government was hostile enough – but imagine the outcry if it suggested something even broader, such as doing away with the “triple lock”, which guarantees British pensioners unjustifiably high pension increases every year.
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It’s the values, stupid
Yet, faced with a falling birthrate and an ageing, often ailing, population and sluggish economic growth, the UK faces rapidly declining living standards – unless it takes drastic action. Other countries in the developed world face similar problems. All of this has exacerbated the increased strain put on budgets by the need for greater defence spending.
And yet voters seem to believe they should never – and can never – be affected by any of this. Governments shy away from disabusing them of that delusion. To be fair to Starmer, he did attempt a more honest approach at the start of his premiership, daring to warn that “things will get worse before they get better”, as he began to explain the gaping black hole in public finances. Now, with Labour’s ratings evaporating, he publicly accepts the prevailing view that this set “the wrong tone”.
Honesty, it seems, does not win votes. Donald Trump could not provide a more clear-cut example. In business, his broken promises regularly resulted in legal actions and in politics, assurances given one day have dematerialised within hours. His one-time disciple in the UK, Nigel Farage, is taking his own idiosyncratic route towards coddling favour with voters. While the government was hunting for ways to limit the spiralling welfare bill, Farage took the opportunity to promise an even more generous approach to welfare, restoring the winter fuel allowance in its entirety and doing away with the two-child cap on certain benefits, which is perceived as a major contributor to child poverty in the UK.
Farage blithely claims that such spending could easily be funded out of the savings his Reform party would be raking in. These would come from its draconian actions against immigrants. This conveniently ignores the fact that the war on immigrants, which is the driver of Farage’s political success, just as it is Trump’s, would have extremely severe economic consequences.
A nation of elderly, increasingly unhealthy, individuals, many of whom expect to be paid not to work, may not want to be told that their future comforts probably depend on there being a large number of young immigrants who are able not only to work in the care sector and NHS, but whose labour will create the economic growth and tax revenues necessary to pay the pensions of the retired. Very few politicians are prepared to make it clear that this is the case.
Telling people only what they want to hear may be seen as the only way of winning at the polls, but it can only lead to a greater defeat as reality dawns.
