Never work with pensioners!

Mike O’Brian the minister for work and pension’s was in our local evening paper again with a follow up story from the one I posted earlier. It seems I wasn’t the only one who noticed how he had been upstaged. The story included some other pensioners who had visited the Black Country Museum to celebrate 100 years of old age pensions. Surprise surprise they were all telling him the same thing as Nora (we need more money Sir and we’ve twigged your wheeze about giving below inflation increases). This was a wide age range of pensioners who were all being extremely nice to him over it. Dear Mike’s answer though was just the same your getting your extra fifty quid fuel allowance so be grateful. Oh dear, do I see some problems on the horizon for Mike O’Brian. The National Pensioners Convention lobby parliament in October I think I might take myself along. That is if he is still in his job by then. He seems to be another in a list of hapless ministers who do not understand the needs of the pensioner population of this country. Why would he? His pension is gold plated and inflation proof. Couldn’t help but think how the latest news of another whopping rise from British Gas in energy prices is going to affect these people. Made much worse by the way they are administering it with immediate effect. They used to have a rebate system for pensioners but that disappeared a year or so back. Here we were thinking `how is our extra 50quid going to meet that` when on the screen comes the Labour leadership battle with again no leadership on the continuing struggle against Browns going bust policies. The country needs leadership now and where are our legislators? Feet up on the beech having a well earned break. Mind you in Browns case the further away the better and the sooner the better as far as I’m concerned. I’ll get on to what should happen to Brown’s pension a little nearer the time of his departure. Anybody running a book on the likely date yet?