Back in the year of our lord, 2023, the then chancellor of the exchequer Jeremy Hunt said that over fifties needed to get off the golf course and get back to work. Millions of us old codgers, he said, “can have an enormously rich life by continuing to make a contribution to the economy. It doesn’t just have to be about going to the golf course.” I spent a great deal of my fifties on the golf course, while doing some part-time work here and there so I could enjoy the good things in life, like going to the golf course. I did not have “an enormously rich life” from working, usually doing crap, inflexible jobs for not much money and being treated like shit by some idiot managers. Hunt – some of us called him another name that sounds like Hunt – was really saying that he needed to bring more money into the treasury and that older people should work until they drop in order to provide him with it. As I said at the time, we see you, Jezza.
Well over three million people aged between 50 and 64 are economically inactive and I say good luck to them. If you can afford to get out of the rat race, even on a reduced income, then I would urge you to do so. The graveyards are full of people of people who never even reached their pension age. Why join them?
I knew a bloke who ‘worked’ into his seventies, getting a long-service award for completing 50 years working for the civil service. He was not in the best of health and no one was surprised when he died in-service. In other words, he never retired. I don’t think that’s worthy of congratulations: I believe it’s worthy of pity.
Of course, I can understand the government’s need to get extra people on the payroll. Public opinion is clearly against relying on immigrants to do the jobs that need to be done, almost always the shit jobs on the minimum wage, so only British workers can do them. But what if we don’t want to? What does the government do then? How about making the prospect of returning to work more attractive?
Pay people a decent wage, allow them to work from home wherever possible, make sure that they don’t have to fork out shitloads of money just to get to work, allow them as much flexibility as possible, rather than flat-out telling people what days and hours they must do “and if you don’t like it, there’s the door“. But we have this mindset, born in the years of Thatcherism, whereby workers are a mere commodity, that their lives don’t matter, that they are modern day slaves. If you’re having a decent time on the golf course, why on Earth would you want to give that all up and wipe people’s arses in a care home for peanuts?
Then, there are is the NEET generation, “Not in Education, Employment, or Training“. Nearly a million young people aged between 16 and 24 come under that category. I know, and know of, young people who have never worked since they left school. Some had children and chose to rely on their families and the state to bring them up, knowing that it was barely worthwhile finding the inevitably low paid, inflexible work, some sell drugs for a living or worse still take them. These are not the only NEETs, as you can imagine, but as with older folk where is the incentive to work?
As for us older folk, we worked hard and paid extra money into our pension pots specifically in order to exit our jobs at the earliest age possible. I will never regret the nine years I spent doing what I really wanted to do, which included mishitting a ball around a golf course, and unless all you have in your life is work, I suggest you do it too.
There were certainly times when I enjoyed my time at work but I have always enjoyed what I do away from work much more. Work was always a means to an end and much of that end was to not spend far too much of my life working.
No. Get on that golf course, that tennis court, that walking football pitch. Force the government to do what you want, not the other way round. Retirement is all it’s cracked up to be and the more you can have of it the better.
