Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s new tax tsar previously called pensioners ‘codgers’ who had it ‘ridiculously good’.
Sir Edward Troup, a former Tory Treasury special adviser, also said it was ‘ridiculous’ that pensioners received free TV licences and argued for them to be taxed more.
His remarks became public earlier this month following his appointment by Labour to its new expert group on combating tax evasion.
In 2019, Sir Edward made a plea for increases in corporate tax, VAT, income tax, and National Insurance payments during a roundtable hosted by the Resolution Foundation.
Advising politicians to raise taxes by stealth, the former special adviser to then Tory chancellor Lord Clarke warned that today’s pensioners have ‘had it ridiculously good’.
He said that it is a ‘complete disgrace’ that pensioners are not paying NIC, adding: ‘I’m told I can’t use the word codgers but, as I’m officially a codger, I think I will.
‘We’ve benefited from low-interest rates, high inflation when we bought our houses, we’ve enjoyed good returns on whatever we’ve managed to put into our pension funds… and it’s a complete disgrace.’
Additionally, he made the case that younger working families need to receive free TV licences.
Sir Edward added: ‘If anybody deserves a free licence to relieve them from the ghastliness of small babies… they’re the ones who deserve it.’
Craig Tracey, Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party and MP for North Warwickshire, said: ‘It should come as no surprise that Labour’s new tax tsar wants to slap working people with higher taxes.
‘They will try to deny it, but Labour’s billions in unfunded spending pledges can only mean one thing—taking us back to square one by hiking up taxes.
‘Meanwhile, this Conservative Government are sticking to the plan and delivering a £900 tax cut for working people.’
Does this dumbbell not realise that a pensioner has to be 75 years old and receive pension credit to qualify for a free TV licence?
People paid National Insurance contributions for 35 years to receive their State Pension. It’s not a benefit; it is something we paid for with our wages when we were working. However, if you get Pension Credit to top it up, then that becomes a benefit paid for by the DWP.
The House of Lords receives more than £300 each day, which makes their situation absurdly favourable. That’s hardly what most retirees receive in a week, and that’s just for sitting their bum on a seat and not doing anything!
No one, including pensioners, should be paying for a TV licence.
People have paid into a system, and the government happily took our money that they call National Insurance for our State Pension, a bit like a bank account so that we could withdraw that money once we reached Pension Age.
Paying money into that system until we were 60-65 years of age should have been more than enough, but now our government keep putting pension age up and up. They want us to work until we drop, that way they can keep our money because we can’t withdraw it, why because we’re dead! However, theft is a criminal activity that goes on within the government all the time, and our government always prey on the most vulnerable.
People who have lived their whole lives contributing to the system appear to be being penalised so that our government may provide something they never paid for to the fresh wave of foreign voters entering our nation, and pensioners have been bled dry through Income Tax and National Insurance all their lives, and every other tax going.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 