In the UK, the people who are paying for today\u2019s retirees are those who won\u2019t be able to retire themselves. We need to muster a full-throated response<\/p>\n
The retirement age creeps up in jerky increments. By 2026, it\u2019ll be 67; from 2044, it\u2019s expected to rise to 68. But do we know that for sure? Or will it be more like Rishi Sunak\u2019s plan to ban smoking, and get a year further off as every year passes, until the entire concept of retirement isn\u2019t even a recollection, just a thing that used to look cool in 40s films? The International Longevity Centre produced a report this week to say that the age would definitely need to go up to 71 for those born after 1970, so yup, this is sounding more and more like \u201cnever\u201d.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s one of the world\u2019s most fracturing discussions, retirement, unless you\u2019re French, in which case you\u2019ll be able to unite instantly around the proposition \u201cMacron, go screw yourself\u201d. Well-paid people who genuinely enjoy financial planning get a thrill from plotting it, their personal qualities iterated in their pleasant imagined future, and they\u2019re picturing themselves wintering in warmer climates, wearing neckerchiefs. This makes them entirely alien to well-paid people who hate financial planning, and none of these people are having a conversation remotely like those whose work is badly paid. They might enjoy it, they might not, it might be physically too arduous to continue to do into your 70s, it might not, but when work gives you no fiscal headroom, as Jeremy Hunt would call it, the idea of needing to do it for ever is more of a swindle. Who\u2019s paying for today\u2019s retirement, if not the people who would retire tomorrow, except they won\u2019t be able to?<\/p>\n
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the UK, the people who are paying for today\u2019s retirees are those who won\u2019t be able to retire themselves. We need to muster a full-throated response The retirement age creeps up in jerky increments. By 2026, it\u2019ll be 67; from 2044, it\u2019s expected to rise to 68. But do we know that for sure? … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3452\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}