MY old granny, to whom I refer affectionately, probably because of the sense of fun she never tried to hide, was born the year of Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee and she lived to see live television pictures of a man walking on the moon (and for some years after that), such was the pace and breadth of change she witnessed in her lifetime.
She was widowed in her early 40s with four children – the eldest two still teenagers – and for the better part of the next half century made her own way in life, sometimes with the help of those children when they had families of their own, but more often than not doing any job that came along.
She never paid social security because by the time that was introduced she was already of pensionable age, and when it did come in she received a princely 26 shillings a week – £1.30 in today’s funny money – and in old age she lived on that and working in hospitality businesses run by two of her children.
There was, of course, another path she could have taken but heaven help anyone who ever suggested it to her or indeed the vast majority of her generation. She could have gone to her parish hall, spoken to the Constable, and in all probability been given a few quid under what was then termed ‘the poor law’, which later became welfare and more recently income support.
Social Security minister Susie Pinel brought the Island up to date last week when addressing one of the bosses’ trade unions – the Institute of Directors – and seemingly spelling out that Jersey residents must be encouraged to plan for their old age with their own pension provisions.
I can’t argue with the principle, although where on earth some people are going to get the money to do so when they are being taxed until the pips come out by the Council of Ministers of which she is a member, asked to pay budget breaking rents by greedy landlords, thus making it virtually impossible to save for a mortgage deposit, let alone a pension which they won’t see in what to youngsters is the foreseeable future.
Where I part company with her is her reference to moving away from what she calls a ‘culture of entitlement’ – a phrase which quite frankly I find insulting and which, if used in the old girl’s hearing, would have set her off for a 30 minute tirade in a mixture of Jersey-French, ‘good’ French and English, with politicians such as Deputy Pinel firmly in her sights. And believe me, they would have learned some new words, that’s for sure.
The ‘culture’ to which the Minister refers – if indeed it exists to any great extent – can be said to have been brought about by that lot in the Big House deciding to transfer the welfare function from the parishes to Deputy Pinel’s department and, sticking my head above the parapet, by the infiltration of bad habits regarding wanting something for nothing which have prevailed for decades in the United Kingdom.
We read last week of the bloke moaning about high rents and halfway down the story find out that he’s spent precisely four years in Jersey, never contributed a brass farthing to this community, yet seems to think it’s the norm to want the Island’s taxpayers to provide him with a roof and spending money.
It really begs the question as to what long gone Constables such as George Le Masurier, Jack Chevalier, John Pirouet and many others who viewed spending parish money as they viewed spending their own would have done when faced with such a situation? Short shrift and a boat ticket would have been the order of the day, methinks.
What it needs is some pretty radical thinking – something along the lines of the States Loan housing scheme, where the Big House of the day realised the difficulty low income families were having in their mortgage repayments and lowered the interest rate to a figure representing no more than a given percentage of their income. It housed a lot of people and the full whack was paid when folk earned more and could afford it.
And finally… Sally Andrews died recently. She was a diligent civil servant – when I first met her she worked at the Housing Department – and she possessed the most infectious laugh I’ve ever heard. Nothing fazed her and she will be missed by a lot of people.
