Russell Jones's Week Moment: Why We Need to Activate Keir Starmer's Last Remaining Cell of Socialism

The Prime Minister needs to start actually doing something useful, and fast, argues Russell Jones

The UK is finished, there’s (probably) nothing we can do about it, and your grandad is mostly to blame.

There. I said it.

Now, I realise opening this week’s column by placing the responsibility for the total collapse of the country at the feet of your lovely, crinkly old grandfather probably isn’t endearing me to you. But as the Conservative Party’s new haircut – Keir Starmer’s pretend Labour party – struggles to express literally any consistent or transformative ideas about tax, benefits or inequality, it’s worth looking head-on at the existential threat their mild tinkering seems designed to totally ignore.

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Demographics and Pension Tinkering

In 1995 the UK had 4.3 working age individuals for every pensioner. Those people’s taxes paid the pensions, with the burden shared across a large group, ensuring nobody felt too much pain. The current ratio of workers to pensioners is 2.9 to 1 and worsening. If the trend continues – and there’s absolutely no reason to suggest it won’t – that number will reach 2:1 by 2050, which sounds a long way away, but is in fact no further from today’s date than the first time you heard Britney Spears sing Oops!... I Did It Again.

Consecutive Governments have addressed this crisis by very slightly raising the pension age, with any such changes usually scheduled to begin a couple of years after they expect to lose a General Election. Thus happily ensuring somebody else gets the blame when the effects are finally felt by voters, while simultaneously making the crisis worse by failing to address it.

As a strategy, this has proven so successful that we now hate all politicians, and the changes have had such a negligible effect that barely 5% of the price of pensions will be saved in a decade’s time, thus delaying that 2:1 ratio by a scant handful of years. It’s sold as a way to avoid a crash. In effect, it’s a speed bump 2 feet in front of the deadly obstacle towards which we’re charging at the speed of time.