Is Guernsey the world capital of haves and have-nots?

Since 2008 everyone else has seen their incomes stagnate.

Whereas many, but not all, pensioners are currently the beneficiaries of so many overly generous public pensions and even private pensions schemes from the nineties. Final salary schemes paid for by the taxpayer, how did that happen?

Will it stop us from being miserable in retirement? No, because it’s the inalienable right of the elderly to be miserable. Being miserable and moaning is only what’s expected of us, right?

We should not complain of boredom though, we played Mario with our children and we know video games.

In our prime we used to say, ‘If I only had the time’, followed by, ‘If only I had the money’, so now we have both, at least for a while.

We have been witness to many monumental events. The moon landings, the eruption of Mount St Helens, Chernobyl, Live Aid, Aids, the pandemic, 9/11, Concorde, the Boxing Day tsunami and the retreat of the glaciers all come to mind.

We will be the only generation that knows the difference between two strokes, four strokes and electric vehicles. And we were the first generation that took up jogging as fitness became an end in itself.

It’s true that come retirement we are only perhaps 50% or less as physically effective as we were in our prime, but we work with what we have.

It’s true that our bodies will torment us for the abuse we heaped on it in our youth. But pain is the price we pay for the privilege of growing old, fair enough. Because we all remember dear friends and family who were lost along the way. Friends and family who never had a chance to suffer/enjoy the pain of ageing.

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, that better not be true. Because every stage of our lives requires us to learn and practise new skills. Ideally by the time we have reached our sixties we will be the very best version of ourselves.

Even if we get sick, we might get an add-on, a second life of sorts. I visited an 80-year-old patient recently, who had a heart transplant at age 65. (In age, watch out for sepsis, the silent assassin, and diabetes, the digit-taker).

So everything is wonderful and dandy then? No actually. When one group prospers, another has to pay. Our children have to pay. What about the pensioners who missed the pensions bandwagon? They have to pay.

A shrinking number of those working is called on to pay for a growing number of those not working retirees. And those working will not enjoy the benefits of home ownership or early fully-funded retirements themselves. They will work, then drop.

That’s a very fine definition of unfair.

In Guernsey you live in open market or you don’t. You work in a bank or you don’t. You live in the south or west or you don’t. You have free health care or you don’t. You own a home or you don’t. You have more than one pension or you don’t. Is Guernsey the world capital of haves and have-nots?

ANDREW LE PAGE

Glenholt

Devon