About forty years ago when I was a young councillor after meetings we discussed the future.
At that time in a period of full employment but rapidly increasing automation the topic was what would happen if/when millions of people were displaced from their work in the manufacturing industries we then had.
Some would be taken up it was considered by shortening the working week, sharing out the work and allowing people more leisure.
This to a degree has happened. The average working week has been reduced from Forty nine hours a week to less than forty (for manual workers).
Kids of today can not believe that Saturday morning working was the norm.
Since then we have lost millions of jobs in mining, manufacturing shipbuilding, fishing, steel and farming as well as many other productive industries.
In addition computers arrived which supposedly reduced the requirement for office workers, although their benefits in this respect are debatable.
Where did all these jobs go? I realise that thanks to the greedy globalist bankers and City types much of manufacturing has been outsourced to countries of the Far East, so where do those displaced from useful work now find employment.
Well, some in service industries such as restaurants but even these types of jobs have been to a degree lost because of foreign travel (think Blackpool boarding house owners and the closure of small shops as a result of supermarkets))
Many have been recruited into the plethora of government non jobs such as diversity officers and outreach co ordinators and paid for by the taxpayer. This put an additional burden on the remaining productive industries, undermining their competitiveness and hastening their demise.
Thus we have had for thirty years an accelerating reduction in productive capacity, growing unemployment and millions of new alien people many of whom do not work.
I now come to the point of this little diatribe.
WE are now told that the retirement age will be increased to 67, in stages as people are living longer. I do of course accept this last fact.
However if people have worked hard all their lives I believe they are entitled to some leisure at the end of it.
Also, if people are expected to work two extra years (women seven) it should be asked in what capacity these people to be employed?
Most manufacturing processes not outsourced are comprehensively automated and increasingly so, thus requiring few extra workers.
We could of course bring back to our country much of the heavy manufacturing industry we GAVE away and although a good idea that has not been mentioned as a solution.
So what are we left with to employ people for another two years?
All I can see is ticking boxes in an overblown non productive State sector as other jobs are not there. As well as that there are over two million young people who have been poorly educated in the wrong subjects languishing on the dole who would be admirably suited to this important function if required.
But that is not the main reason for this brilliant idea.
Pensions pay more than unemployment benefit so those who would today be classed as pensioners would be reclassified as unemployed and thus cheaper. There would be no more people in work than there are now, it would just mean that the unemployed would cost less, but not that much less as dole is still a cost to the State.
Everyone accepts that the huge demographic problem of a naging population must mean a different solution to that of the past. Is there an answer?
Yes I believe there is.
Most of our daily needs can be provided with a fraction of the work than was necessary in the pre computer and automated days, and can be provided for by a better allocation of resources.
We should exit the EU, control our fisheries, halt immigration and handouts to so called asylum seekers, halt foreign aid and wars. These measures would pay for people's retirement several times over. Remember those now of retirement age paid their taxes which have been wasted by government extravagence.
There should be no need in a modern industrialised country for people to work until they drop.
There is more to life than toil and in any case after fifty years of work a few years of rest have been well earned.
Until we get a competent and honest government and an electorate which can see through the garbage peddled by it we will have to suffer these fools.
However big changes are afoot and the people will become increasingly restive all over Europe as evidenced by the panic by the incompetent thieves as yet in control at the implications of the inevitable Greek default.
THERE IS STILL HOPE.
