The township of 12 people
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East End of Glasgow
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
Is it fair that
people can once again
be fired for being old?
John Cameron
When my year held a dinner to celebrate the half-century since we entered Falkirk High School, I found that at 62 years of age I was the only one still in full-time employment. FHS was one of the fabulous high schools in the pre-comprehensive era which produced a new professional elite from the aspirational working class of industrial Scotland.
My contemporaries, a formidable array of doctors, lawyers, accountants, civil servants, university lecturers and senior teachers, had the wherewithal to call it a day around 60. I had hoped to do the same but the Kirk’s pension woes had taken early retirement off the table and yet I have to say that these last five years were among the best of my entire career. Well, I hear people saying, the clergy only work one day a week – would you have been so happy if you had remained in the stressful head office of an international firm? Good point, but the next generation may have little option but to grind on in a job they may have come to loath because, outside the public sector, pensions have been trashed.
The Equality Act 2010 consolidated our Byzantine array of anti-discrimination laws and the default retirement age will soon disappear to allow the elderly to stay on in work. Of course that is the theory – it was only to be expected that in practice the judiciary would turn it into an arcane muddle resulting in more work and much gold for our lawyers.
A recent ruling by the Supreme Court has returned to employers the right to dismiss old people because they are old in certain rather enigmatic and ambiguous circumstances. It appears that a person may be lawfully dismissed on grounds of age if such dismissal meets the objectives of the latest social engineering dreamed up by the government. The most obvious example that comes to mind would be intergenerational fairness; and oldies can apparently be turfed out legally to reduce unemployment among the young.
The problem with this sort of political judgement is that the ‘legitimate objectives’ of any government – given our muddle-headed policy wonks – are likely to be contradictory. The coalition wants to reduce the European-wide problem of youth unemployment and forcing older people to retire might allow some young people to at last find a job. Well, that could work for those who are not entirely unemployable but what about the need to delay the retirement age because the cost of pensions is a drag on the economy? And the government claims the right to arbitrate in competing claims of discrimination but, given the record of official incompetence, that is a recipe for disaster. After all, oldies are in this mess because all post-war governments oversaw a giant Ponzi operation: unfunded pyramid schemes for both state and public service pensions.
It is tempting to blame the whole fiasco on Gordon Brown’s infamous Robert Maxwell memorial budget – tempting but the blame deserves to be much more widely shared.
