Stolen from fbuck 05 October 2021. The author like myself was born in northwest Lancashire, England but could have been born & lived in any part of the world apart from the communist states to have experienced similar. If in communist states the gulag, the re-education camp, starvation & the secret police together with fear of non Communist attack\ obliteration would probably have been the principal concerns.

Susie English

Just heard from the reporter that they are going to use it..... in the EXPRESS next week! Hopefully they'll use the photo too.

Life in the UK has become much more unfair – A 50s woman who had her pension stolen.

I was born in a council house. Mam was a welder in a factory and dad was a labourer. They worked opposite shifts and until I was old enough to become a latchkey kid I was often passed from parent to parent at a halfway mark from their places of work. Food was short and cheap, clothes were functional and needed to last a long time but my parents always tried to get us a caravan holiday every summer. Treats were few but most people on our council estate were in the same circumstances so you really didn’t think much about it.

I married young and foolishly but life was a bit easier financially by then. We managed to buy a house and felt like we were reasonably off. Then, in 1984 in reaction to Thatcher wanting to destroy the coal industry, there came the miner’s strike. Like many in the area, my husband was a striking miner. Thatcher put a stop to welfare and we lived off £8 a week and a food parcel. I spent days collecting food from our small town streets and queueing at the NCB soup kitchen to feed us. Every food parcel contained a tin of rice pudding....can’t face it now.....and a tin of corned beef. Once I cut my finger badly opening the corned beef with the fiddly key system. My husband caught me just before my head hit the floor as I fainted. Can’t stand blood. Still have the scar. Strangers fed us and gave us clothes. Unions from all over Europe sent food and clothes and toys for the kids. That Christmas my toddler didn’t go without. I saved all year and my mum helped me buy everything from charity shops for her. I was lucky, toddlers don’t demand much...

By the time she was five, my husband had obviously lost his job alongside our self-respect, we’d lost our home and then, our marriage. Poverty isn’t conducive to good relationships. There were a lot of repossessed houses and broken marriages in our area.

Fast forward through another marriage and my youngest starting school and I have actually managed to study my way to university! Then I taught first in colleges, then in schools.....which all comes to an end after I am attacked in a privately maintained behaviour school. I was attacked twice by the same pupil. Despite fierce union backing and because of dire lack of support from the school’s management it all ended badly and I lost my job and ended up with complex PTSD. I would never teach again...and because this was due to lack of confidence (teaching is at least 90% confidence) that affected other areas of my life too. I was 56 years old. It was just after this I found out online I would not be able to retire at 60. I had been paying into a contract with the government since the age of 16, on the proviso I would retire at 60......and they had welched on that contract! My four years of struggle before I get my pension had suddenly become TEN.....with very little notice.
My kids have grown up and are furiously paddling their own little rackety boats in the mire that is the UK. I’m desperate to help but I live off a tiny teachers’ pension, I could only pay a few years into as I came to teaching late, and we also have my husband’s disability payment. The Rowntree Foundation has determined that a single person in the UK needs around £18k a year to live reasonably. (2018). My husband and I are barely surviving on £12K between us. We have debts and unpaid commitments. Never have meals out or treats and have only been on holiday once in the last ten years and that, of course, was on a budget and one of the few happy memories we can hold on to. I didn’t deserve this. I paid my dues. I pulled myself up with my bootstraps and worked my way through university after a late start. My husband was a young soldier who thought going to the Falklands on The Canberra was an adventure until, as a medic, he was putting Argentinian intestines back in bodies and seeing sights no one should see. We could never afford it but we could never go on a cruise and he can’t eat salt and vinegar crisps because the smell reminds him of all the Argentinian bodies they stored in the swimming pool on The Canberra. He wakes in the night screaming.

When I was a young mother out shopping in town with my kids I would often stop and look in the windows of cafes and coffee shops and, knowing I couldn’t manage drinks and snacks for me and my kids and had to walk on, I would think how lucky the elderly were to sit snacking and drinking in those places, chatting and looking at us through the window. I knew one day, what comes around goes around....except it hasn’t, it was snatched away.

Did we deserve to spend our retirement in poverty? What did we do wrong? What did the ordinary working class people in this country do wrong? You see, when I was a kid, we literally were ‘all in it together’! We were all the same. Now I see billionaires in government handing contracts to their billionaire mates. I see ministers thieving pension rights....and retiring at 50. I see MPs who pay £20 for a snack tell the poor, they are taking £20 off them knowing what a high percent of their income it is. My husband and I paid our dues to queen and country all our working lives yet are treated with contempt. Is that really fair?
Sue