the brilliantly leaping gazelle

As I imagine most people were, I was shocked by the news earlier this week that Woking Council, faced with a £1.2billion budget deficit, has proposed a plan to address this by implementing a drastic measure of cuts, including those to care, the arts, sports groups, playgrounds and community schemes. The scale of the councils debt is only matched by the number of councils that will soon be in the same situation.

The Independent reported that at least 30 per cent of councils in some of the poorest areas of the country are considering declaring effective bankruptcy this year and, for added doom and gloom also added that a survey of 47 local authorities in the North, the Midlands and on the South Coast revealed the severe strain on finances meant five are currently in the process of deciding whether to issue a section 114 notice of their inability to balance their annual budget in 2023-24.

The reason I was shocked wasn’t so much that this the situation we now find ourselves in, but more that an abject collusion of complicity between politicians and the electorate has allowed this to happen. That is sort of the point I was making in my last post, regarding the seemingly Faustian pact between us – the electorate – and them – the politicians -, that allows the fantasy of better public services and lower taxes to become a reality. The one that permits the electorate and the media to protest vociferously about individual incidents, whilst remaining conveniently silent about the system that perpetuates such. The one that that places increasingly unrealistic expectations on councils to do more with less .So in the last week we have had the scandal of the less than concrete concrete and now councils going bust and no doubt more scandals are just waiting to be revealed.

I was also shocked because this state of affairs needn’t be this state of affairs, if only politicians were brave enough to tell the electorate the truth and that the electorate was mature enough to hear it it. Yes, we have an ageing population, we know that, but what exactly does that mean?

Well, according to the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), whereas today 18% of the population is over the age of 65, by 2065 they predict it will be 26%. The OBR also has a lot of forecasts, analysis and projections that I’m sure are as fascinating as they are terrifying but what I takeaway from it is this; 26% of people in 2065 will be costing the state much more than they contribute, 15% of people will be under 16 and same thing, will cost the state more but contribute nothing, but the difference is that they will eventually contribute.

Under any metric one chooses, it seems to me that the current state of things – and things are in a right state – is as socially irresponsible as it is catastrophically unaffordable. I’ve just had a quick look at the UK governments care and statutory guidance as updated this year and it underlined for me not only why we are where we are as regarding councils providing these services and financial consequences resulting from doing so, but much more importantly, that we have to stop.

So rather viewing assisted dying as something best avoided, parliamentarians of all parties should instead seize the initiative, explain the sums of money involved – adult social care alone cost £26.9 billion in 2021/22, up 3.8% from 2020/21 and according to the OBR, pensions will account for 42% of the welfare budget this year, that’s £124 billion, the largest single expenditure – and as soon as possible introduce a scheme of state sponsored euthanasia.

When the current crop of pensioners – those over 80 I’m talking about here – were adults of working age and paid tax, successive governments had a realistic expectation that their time as a pensioner might last for maybe 15 years or so. Wasn’t that the deal with state pensions? That their tax paid for the pensions of the old, and when they were old the tax paid by others paid for theirs. However, the Office for National Statistics estimate that by 2045 there will be 3.1 million of them or 4.3% of the population. So to my way of thinking, anyone over the age of 85 who is claiming a state pension is guilty of benefit fraud. It may well be through no fault of their own, but they’re still claiming a benefit to which they’re not entitled.

However unpalatable one might find the prospect of state sponsored euthanasia, it doesn’t make it any the less logical. The government could offer pensioners upon retirement a deal, a lump sum equal to the value of their pension for 15 years – that’s the state sponsored bit – in return for a guaranteed undertaking for voluntary euthanasia on their part. 15 years seems about enough time for people to pit all their affairs in order, take all the holidays they’d never had and generally depart with dignity. Of course, when the 15 years had elapsed they could renege on their part of the deal, of corse they could, but that would mean an immediate termination of any governmental – local or central – responsibility for them.

And of corse the benefits to society would be worth it. If people knew what the deal was, then the money invested in private pensions – estimated to be £112 billion in 2021 by the Institute for Fiscal Studies – quite a bit of that might be ploughed back into the economy. It would also help the NHS. It’d help solve the bed blocking crisis for one thing and also alleviate its obscene staffing shortage and also its obscenely expensive cost. There’d also be a benefit to the housing sector, inasmuch as more stock became available, house prices and rents would fall. Employment too. There’d be a huge swathe of jobs that were no longer needed, thereby creating new employment opportunities.

It will happen. How soon it happens and exactly what form it’ll take, is a question of when the unthinkable becomes thinkable.