Author Topic: Helping the aged  (Read 3584 times)

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Offline Mary

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Helping the aged
« on: Tuesday, 24 February, 2015 @ 04:36:04 »
...help themselves:

Quote
David Cameron had been rather hoping that the day’s main headlines would be about his pensions speech. Unfortunately, the speech was overshadowed by a somewhat more explosive story on the front of the Telegraph. Still, he soldiered on as best he could.

It was vital to protect pensions and pensioners’ benefits, he told an audience at Saga’s office in Hastings, because “the older generation” should “be given the dignity and security they deserve”.

These are sentiments with which the public is bound to agree. The government must ensure old people live in comfort. After all, no one wants to see a repeat of this morning’s shocking front-page story – in which it was revealed that two 68-year-old men had been reduced to eking out a living by negotiating cash-for-access deals in Parliament with a fictitious Chinese firm.

Across Britain, readers were horrified to learn of the miserable penury that had driven two respectable older gentlemen to take such drastic measures. One of the men, known as Jack – a former foreign secretary – was found to be subsisting on just £67,000 a year, plus £112,777 in additional earnings. The other, Malcolm – also a former foreign secretary – was scraping by on the same basic income, plus additional earnings of only £69,610.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11430366/Sketch-Jack-Straw-and-Malcolm-Rifkind-how-their-plight-touched-a-nation.html