We earned pensions with years of hard work

From: D Birch, Smithy Lane, Cookridge, Leeds.

AS an old age pensioner, with the emphasis on “old”, I am getting a little fed up of this coalition of very young graduates and undergraduates who don’t really know what productive work is all about, wanting to cut down on the money earned in most of our working periods since World War Two, with companies who put the Great back into what was left of the Britain as we knew it.

Employees from that era helped build the industry at home and all over the world with our exports, and paid both to the National Health Service and to our own pension funds for anything up to 40 years. I would like to confirm just how much the DSS pension has moved since I retired in 1987. It was £43.66 per week and in the working year when Labour was in power in 2008-09, it was £131.87. It took 22 years to get an increase of £68.21. Not what you would call generous by any standard. I think we all appreciate that the current coalition increase has been much better, in fact £8.95 or £2.98 per week more.

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So before all those in the “take it from the wealthy pensioners” lobby start to take over, they need to do their homework. Better still, get a job with lots less money and find out what they are doing to the working people of today. Especially the idiot MP who wants to have people “means-tested” and benefits taken away, including some of his own constituents, of course, who are in receipt of child benefit, which, incidentally most of our long lasting pensioners never got. In fact, I would think most of us who they want to screw have had the luck to never be out of work, but also worked 16-hour days, building our own benefits which are already still taxed and paid.

I and many people like me are very sorry for the ones who currently are only working 16 hours per week, just to be able to get some benefits from a state that should owe them better, but are still being used by the state as part of their job statistics, which is disgusting.

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