312 Sprinter
Active Member
For the final time... YOU HAVE DONE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO CONTRIBUTE TO MY PENSION! I paid for it myself.
Are you seriously suggesting that by contributing 6% you've paid for your gold plated NHS pension yourself? Don't be ridiculous. The tax payer is paying for your pension. And that is fair enough, that after all, is the deal.
As I've pointed out before this is simply a numbers game. In order to keep the economy running it needs a reasonable number of working age people v retired people. If the equation goes out of wack the sums don't add up.
It may appeal to the base instincts of some of the electorate to huff and puff about immigration and foreigners, but actually it matters not in the slightest. We educate people because the country needs an educated work force. There is no guarantee that anyone, native or foreign, will stay in the country where they were educated. In a sense that is a bigger problem for underdeveloped countries. Lots of well educated people will want to live somewhere in Europe or America or Australia. When the West starts poaching trained nurses from the Phillipines it is rather harder for them to replace their skilled workforce than it is for the West.
We've grown rich precise because our economies are open. It encourages trade, it brings in new ideas, young people to work, new technology, export opportunities. If it was actually desirable to batten down the hatches and restrict the movement of people, money and ideas then communist Russia, Cuba etc etc would have grown wealthy. They did not. China had to open up its economy to get it to grow.
The birth rate in the west won't shoot up any time soon, and as long as it doesn't the politicians will keep importing people regardless of the lip service the bay to the base xenophobic instincs of the electorate.