You have probably forgotten all about the fifth anniversary of the 7/7 bombings by now haven’t you? It was nearly a week ago already and I am sure you are back to worrying about the direction of the markets or something important.
There are many reasons to keep on remembering 7/7 – there are the 52 who lost their lives, but there are also the emergency services that did their best to help those affected.
On that day, as some of you may know, I also found myself admitted to hospital with an illness that left me paralysed down one side and speechless (some might say the second part of that was no bad thing).
I eventually emerged from hospital some nine weeks later, having been the recipient of the same care the NHS gave out to victims of the bombings.
I remember the NHS as the most amazing free emergency service possible. As a result of my illness, I still spend far too much time in its care, and it is easy to complain. It is inefficient and bureaucratic but, as the world’s third-largest employer after the Chinese army and Indian railway, it is entitled to be.
I am lucky to carry on getting my care for free, particularly as much of it is precautionary rather than emergency. I am lucky not because I could afford to pay for some of it, but because the NHS cannot really afford to give it to me for free.
And that is the point –we have a welfare state we cannot really afford and now is surely the time to start that debate in earnest. The NHS itself has been overused and under-resourced literally from the day it was launched because politicians have constantly underestimated the demand.
It was created to build a land fit for heroes – the heroes being those soldiers returning from the Second World War, just as the state pension developed from Victorian paternalism to be a reward for the ordinary working man who had endured the First World War. It was never envisaged to be the main form of pension provision for such a large part of the population – and for a population that keeps growing in number.
The debate has started over pensions – but a small rise in the retirement age barely scratches the surface and neither does the simplistic debate about pensions apartheid between public and private sector.
The average public sector employee has an annual pension sum of £8,000 to add to the basic state pension of around £5,000 – £13,000 is hardly a sum to live respectably upon in retirement.
The debate is not about public versus private, but about how everyone can achieve a decent level of retirement income, irrespective of who their employer is – so the state pension can be the emergency payment for the least able.
The debate is a simple one – we have to ask ourselves how far the role of the state should extend and be prepared to face up to the future that we all have to provide for ourselves first while the state can only realistically be an emergency service.
Lawrence Gosling is the founding editor of Investment Week. His views are his own, any comments to him at lawrencegosling@sky.com
