The Productive Pessimist

  Image shows an elder man in a turquoise shirt sitting at a wooden table, working on a laptop The UK Parliament - not simply the current party of government, but the majority of the House of Commons - are, according to an unnamed whistleblower, and the I Paper of Thursday 16th April 2026, all in agreement that the  UK State pension triple lock  - the requirement that UK pensioners with at least 35 years' National Insurance contributions benefit from increases in the amount of pension they receive as a taxpayer-funded benefit rises each year by whichever is highest; inflation, average earnings, or 2.5% -   needs  to be reformed, but are equally  all afraid to come out and talk about even the concept  of reform, much less how it could look in practice. UK State pension provision currently accounts for 55% of the UK welfare bill, at £146.1billion per year. This is nearly double the £77billion pounds annually spent on supporting disabled people through St...

                                            On Friday 20th September 2024, it was revealed that the UK’s national debt was equal to the income the UK was able to generate; in short, debt was at 100% of GDP. This last occurred in the 1960s - and resulted in the following decade, the 1970s, being extremely difficult for ordinary people, with standards of living declining sharply across all demographics, something which, inevitably, hit those who were already experiencing poverty the hardest. The 1970s saw a massive loss of manufacturing in Britain - historically, the one sector that had been able to pull Britain through the downturns of economic cycles, because the UK used to be known, and respected for, exceptional quality of its manufactured goods, and many countries around t...