Your article about our ageing population by Aidan Sawley in the February issue trots out the same old misguided ideas that flow from the intellectual elite running UK Ltd. they say that increasing the population is going to solve the funding crises facing us retirees, by increasing the working population tax take, but they fail to say how that next, even larger generation, are going to be funded. On this basis, they will presumably advocate an even bigger increase in population, but when our island is full with people, what then?
When my father was born in 1911, the population was about 30 million. When i was at school in the early 1950s we were told that our population was about 50 million, now we are heading for 70 million. In my lifetime our population has increased by well over 30% and in that same period, World population has trebled. How on earth can we keep announcing initiatives to tackle the many problems we have today regarding sustainability, without looking at our population explosion? The people pumping out their theories will be long gone when we realise it is too late.
Some of the causes of this predicament are not the fault of us living longer. Most of my generation left school at 15 or 16, we didn’t go to ‘uni’, but we did go to work and started to pay tax etc. it is not uncommon for today’s youngsters to still be in education well into their twenties, by which time we would have been contributing to our pensioner population for at least five years. We also had to contribute 44 years Ni contribution (40 for women); to get our ‘State Pension’, but politicians recently reduced the Ni contribution requirement to 30 years!
Colin Gray, Telford
