Vince Cable and Nick Clegg. No winter fuel payment for men over 60!

Vince Cable and Nick Clegg have been quietly scheming away and in the spirit of a new ‘reality’ they have come up with a whiz-bang idea for repaying the National Debt.

Women have been enjoying the luxury of State Pension payments at the young age of 60 years up till now. The Labour party have already legislated so that this age rises to 65 in stages from 2010 to 2020. This will equalise the compulsory retirement age for the payment of state benefits to 65 for men and women.

This arrangement is clearly discriminatory towards men since women receive state pension at a younger age and on average live longer than men. To add insult to injury comparing male and female employees between 60 and 65, once a woman is in receipt of her state pension she stops paying National Insurance Contributions which means that women in this category are a state pension plus eleven percent of income better off than men.

Now this rather unsatisfactory arrangement is slowly going to unwind over the next ten years not to the benefit of men but to the detriment of women.

Coming back to Messrs Cable and Clegg, their rather clever wheeze is already happening, as the pension qualifying age rises so will the threshold for winter fuel payments, by 2020 winter fuel payments will be paid at age 65 for everybody (if they still exist).

As a sop to men in this category we get the crumbs off the gender inequality table in the form of winter fuel payments and a bus pass (here in Scotland at least)

The two guilty men in their first ‘realistic’ cut are going to remove the fuel payment.

Are they going to remove it from women who are in receipt of the state pension at, let’s say 61 or 62. I don’t think so. If this goes ahead it will be men in this age category who will suffer this mean cut.

So, dear Mr Cable and Mr Clegg. Go back to the drawing board. Your mean-spirited cut is actually the most egregious piece of gender discrimination seen in this country in a very long time and I guess your planned-for £400 million of saving in the light of ‘reality’ will turn out to be very much less…