Congratulations! At 80 you’ll get 25p extra per week!

WHY is it that British people accept such low levels of welfare benefits compared with other leading European nations, plus obscene levels of inequality reaching vast millions living in poverty and dependent on food banks?

Could it be the hard-right politics of Tory governments under Thatcher, Cameron, May, and now Johnson, interspersed with the soft-right politics of Blair’s Labour from 1997 to 2010?

In other words, all strong pro-capitalist with little leftist socialism until the emergence of Corbyn and McDonnell, both unfortunately duped into slaughter by misreading the popular ‘get it done’ nationalism of Johnson’s fraudulent Brexit-led general election victory last December.

To prove my point, I recently got the big ‘P’ marked letter from our Pension Service which read as follows: “Now that you are approaching 80, you are entitled to a higher amount of State Pension...”

Wow, I thought – that’s just what I need! It went on: “Age Addition of 25p per week will be payable from your 80th birthday on 28/09/20.”

Can you believe that in this sixth richest, Tory marvellous, country in the world, an OAP is offered by its government the measly sum of 25p for becoming 80?

Talk about the political hard-right extremism of Britain’s welfare provisions by all means, forgetting the old Tory lie of us being “a soft touch”, and join the fight for green leftist socialism where public good conquers private greed from top to bottom.

Odd how this echoes current Johnson-Sunak’s enormous buildup of our national debt to over £2 trillion, with annual budget deficit of over £400 billion and unemployment around 4 million: who, or what, will foot the bill?

Will Keir Starmer and Labour’s new leadership team be as socialist as before and will Labour membership still support the Party’s transformational manifesto?

These are the big questions regarding Britain’s longer term future into increasingly severe climate emergency following on from the current financial and environmental disasters of Covid-19, no-deal Brexit (via Johnson’s extreme ERG backers), biodiversity crash, resource depletion and pollution, plus increasing population and superpower conflict... Sadly, with climate emergency’s ranges of climate chaos, global warming, and sea-level rises, its major new disasters are those of massive world food shortages and extra global migration of peoples from sea-covered low-lying areas: deltas especially, including most of the 225 million people currently in Bangladesh!

Alan Debenham Taunton