As the election campaign hots up, all the parties are emailing those who have signed up to their email lists on all sorts of issues.
In the past few days, we’ve seen one from Harriet Harman admonishing the recipient for not responding to Labour’s opinion survey. It had one question, basically “Are you voting Labour?” There wasn’t even a “maybe” option.
We’ve seen a missive David Cameron (or his digital equivalent) has emailed to his distribution list to take credit for the pensions triple lock. The wording looks like it’s been copied and pasted from a Liberal Democrat equivalent.
Now, everyone knows that that was Liberal Democrat pensions guru Steve Webb’s idea. If you look in the 2010 Tory manifesto, you see a commitment to restoring the link to earnings, but that’s about it.
In contrast, this is what the Lib Dem manifesto had to say:
Nice try, Dave, but it won’t wash.
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16 Comments
My dad replied to that email saying exactly this: he was most annoyed, bless him.
He asked me if he ought to try to unsubscribe from the tory emailing list – he has no idea how he got on it – but I find his furious rants about the contents of the emails far too amusing to ever let him do that… 😉
Oh, Steve Webb’s responsible for the triple lock is he? It is a good thing he isn’t the PPC for my constituency, I’d have difficulty voting for someone personally responsible for an over £12bn increase in welfare spending over the duration of the Parliament.
I am yet to hear any compelling justification for the triple lock pension. And the pensioner ringfence for that matter.
If Labour had come up with the triple lock policy, what would the Coalition response be?
I also do not see what there is to be so proud of by the triple lock pension.
All the money that has been saved from the welfare budget to “working age benefits” has been cancelled out by the increases to Pensioner related benefits.
This coalition justified the cuts to welfare due to the spiraling out of control welfare costs and the need to get the deficit under control, which lets face it was a pile of poop. It was simply about sweetening up the silver vote { The ones who tend to vote} on the backs of the poor and vulnerable {who don’t tend to vote}
It is a disgrace
Then to top it off, Liberal Democrats in Government approved these “pensioner bonds” which allows well off pensioners with £40k laying around to invest money at 4%. A cost of Hundreds of Millions of pounds to the Tax payer.
What happened to the priority of paying down the deficit?
This is outrageous and you know it..
Sorry but” everyone ” does not know that the triple lock was a Lib idea.It is up to us to shout from the roof and take credit for all the economic achievements of the coalition as well as our own successes.
Currently we seem to be being squeezed in the air war by the two main parties.This has serious ramifications for the success of our GE campaign.Our poll ratings currently largely languish in single figures. We need desperately to get them into double figures in the next four weeks in time for dissolution of parliament and the proper GE campaign on the 30th March.Failure to do that will mean us being painted as losers. In effect the GE is like a huge by election.If we are still in single figures and not in third place then w e risk being squeezed further.This would undermine our ground war focusing on our held seats.
We are virtually invisible at present.We can’t expect any significant poll rating increases unless we achieve greater visibility.
Anyone who thinks that “all the parties are emailing people who have signed up to their email lists” is living in cloud cuckoo land. They are emailing every damned email address they can get hold of, by whatever means. The get round the law (if they bother) by telling them (often in tiny letters) how they can unsubscribe.
Tony
@jennie: I love the sound of your Dad. Mine’s a Tory:=(
@Caron count yourself lucky. .. mine posts on here!!! I think you may have come across him! 😉
If his name is Stephen, I think I might have done:-).
This Katherine Hesketh-Holt person has obviously inherited her father’s sense humour and impeccable political values! Though luckily for her, her mothers looks 🙂
The triple lock was in the coalition agreement so both parties can take some credit. The structural changes are certainly Steve’s babies. They’re a lot harder to explain than just giving people more money but they are probably the area for which we deserve the greatest credit.
It was Mrs. Thatcher that broke the link between earnings in the general populations and state pensions. Governments in between tried to compensate by adding other benefits for poorly off pensioners. The problem then is that some pensioners are not financially savvy, or have longstanding distaste for applying for ‘charity’. So means-tested benefits are even less likely to reach pensioners who need them than they do with other cohorts of the population. The triple-lock is a step back from this undesirable situation.
As a (well-off) pensioner paying income tax on every penny of my state pension, I am amused to receive a Christmas present from the Prime Minister – Edward Heath, that is. When the £10 was instituted, it was one or two weeks pension, but it has remained unchanged ever since. This is symbolic, along with ’75p increases’ of how pensions have been treatedup to 2010.
I hear too often that pensioners complain how badly the government has treated them. they are taking the rhetoric from labour. we do need to make it very clear what has been done – and in words with more meaning than “triple lock”, too.
Also it was in the coalition agreement, but only because we insisted on it being in there.
Political party is economical with the truth in run-up to election…..Excuse me if I don’t seem too surprised
Ian Sanderson – Really?
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/325315/pensioners-incomes-series-statistics-july-2014.pdf
In particular, page 6 – ‘Pensioners’ mean net income has grown faster than incomes for the whole population over the last fourteen years. Net income After Housing Costs for pensioner units has grown by 37 per cent between 1998/99 and 2012/13 in real terms, whereas mean incomes for the whole population have risen by 12 per cent in real terms over the same period.’
The table at page 17 is also interesting.
Exactly how much Xmas bonus is it you want?
‘Exactly how much Xmas bonus is it you want?’
Personally, zero would be fine by me, but then I have a fairly generous occupational pension which I paid into for 28 years, so I could probably get by without state pension (which I paid into for 43 years) or my two private pensions (one of which represents employment outside a pension scheme). Alternatively, I could pay more tax. It’s just that I think the Christmas Bonus and the Winter Fuel Allowance, which also hasn’t changed are really a way of saying that the government recognised that those reliant on a state pension weren’t really getting enough to live on.