No wonder pensioners are disillusioned

Madam, – “From each according to means, to each according to needs.”

It’s an admirable social mantra.

However in recent years the words have become synonymous with government.

Scots were never capital chasers and mostly aspired to living in council or social housing, but with encouragement from Westminster there was a rush to buy occupied houses at a significantly reduced price compared with market value.

Our first minister came from such a family of capital owners and, with others, helped reduce the housing stock of all councils throughout the land.

Only now, since the lady decided to make Scotland a socialist country, has the practice been stopped.

Unfortunately the legacy of the past has now caught up in the form of capital ie houses being commandeered to pay for the costs of providing care to pensioners.

In actual fact those pensioners being hit by such a policy have already been hit big time – once, when asked to pay 14 years’ more national insurance than anyone else to get a pension, and then again when their private pension pot was sealed into the system so it could not be spent, and therefore leaving people dependent upon the state.

Is it any wonder senior pensioners are disillusioned by the state?

Particularly, the so-called socialist state purporting to represent and look after them.

Senior Scottish pensioners are being used as a cash cow to support incompetent government with the three whammies – 14 years’ national insurance for nothing, no pension pot on moral grounds, and having their capital, worked and paid for to provide for families, taken from them to pay for their care.

The saddest thing of all is they are the ones who have fought all their lives to provide the freedoms of democracy and a strong economy to provide for this and future generations.

For this they receive little thanks, gratitude or appreciation. Only blame and handouts.

Instead, the new social mantra should read “from those who have anything, to those in control who want it.” Alan Bell.

Roods, Kirriemuir.