...pensioner's fuel bills?
[I]ncovenienced?
Oh dear. Hypothermia appears to be befuddling the legendary Challinor punctuational and spelling faculties.
Bloody word. It could do with shedding an n or so just for the sake of maintaining venience in company; but try to help and are people grateful? No they are not.
The apostrophe thing is the result of misguided complacency about the pensions minister's punctuation and/or the Grauniad's (I know, I know) proofreaders. Damn that cut and paste.
Isn't this mostly due to the insane methodology for calculating poverty, under which a rise in average earnings for non-pensioners magically catapults some pensioners under the poverty line? I'm not convinced that my pay rise in 2006/07 /actually/ made your gran poorer.
That doesn't mean that many pensioners aren't suffering now - just that the reason is because their costs are rising faster than other households and they're not as well off as other households to start with, not because other people got bigger pay rises than them in the biggest boom year...
I'm not convinced that my pay rise in 2006/07 /actually/ made your gran poorer.
Nor am I, which is why I didn't claim any such thing. My own pay rise this year, being below the rate of inflation, actually made me poorer.
Likewise for me, this year.
You seemed to award some credibility to the poverty stats, despite the fact that they're based on a % of average earnings rather than on how poor people actually are. As the IEA says in the Grauniad piece, pensioners' incomes actually rose quite a bit over the period - just not as much as everyone else's.
I was merely judging New New Labour by the standards New New Labour sets itself. Dastardly of me, I know.
Well John, it depends whether you think there's any relative aspect to poverty. I think there is and I particularly think there is where pensioners are concerned since there's a reasonable argument which suggests that part of their reward at the end of their working life should be a fair share of the wealth they helped to create.
It's a rhetorical comment, I know, but so was yours.
In the Netherlands, poverty starts when you can't go abroad on holidays more than one time each year, I don't know in GB...
In GB we make a more subtle distinction. The ones who can't go on holiday more than once a year are the deserving poor (unless they're welfare cheats). Those who can't afford a holiday at all are boot camp customers (unless they're criminals).
Yes things have changed in a labouriously
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