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Whose side are you on? |
Reflections on Remembrance Day
Many of today's pensioners served in the war against Nazi Germany to defend such traditional British values as justice and even-handedness. Later, those of us who emigrated on retirement to spend our remaining years near children and grandchildren in a major Commonwealth country were dismayed to find ourselves victims of a remarkable discrimination.
Contrary to undertakings given by the then Secretary of State for Social Services Mr (now Sir) Norman Fowler that "all insured people, rich or poor, would pay the same contributions for the same security", and despite our having paid those same contributions, we find our pensions frozen at the amount which applied when first we qualified. Each passing year sees our income falling ever more behind that of our fellow pensioners in the UK and some thirty other countries, in particular those in the USA and the EU - including Germany!
In seeking to have this gross injustice corrected, we naturally turned to Parliament, only to find both Government and Opposition Front Bench united in a policy of avoiding moral obligations, often on the flimsiest pretext. When spending is involved, they seem to reason that the public purse should only be used to promote projects likely to benefit the masses. Thus are traditional virtues of morality and equity sacrificed in the total concentration on electoral advantage. Outside Parliament there is no institution to which the aggrieved Britons can appeal.
Germany by contrast has a Constitutional Court to hear complaints of breach of natural justice. It looked at expatriate pensions and pronounced that "like cases should be treated alike" - anticipating Norman Fowler's "same contributions for the same security". The difference was the Germans evidently meant what they said.
The Court further ruled that contributory pension rights should be seen as "the property of the contributor and therefore the state must justify occasions when pension rights are withdrawn if a person leaves the country" - a principle which Britain has signally failed to follow. For Germany and for ten other leading OECD countries, it is axiomatic that pension payments are related to contributions irrespective of domicile. Britain alone practises selective discrimination.
What irony to find that we, the victors, have lost what we fought to defend, while the vanquished have assumed our mantle of morality and equity. Who in Britain shares my shame that we would have found more justice and greater compassion in our declining years had we been born German?