Hutton’s 2006 pension review proposal shows that the cost of public sector pensions is falling from 1.9% of GDP to 1.4%. It is not unsustainable, as the Prime Minister has claimed.

The government have not carried out a new cost review for the TPS (teacher’s pension scheme) since then, despite being called to do so by the trade unions. Any claims about the costs are not based on any evidence more recent that Hutton.

From last April, the index that contributions are linked to was switched from RPI to CPI. The former is an estimate of average annual cost increases that includes rising property prices, the latter is an estimate that does not. This will represent roughly a 15% drop in the value of our pensions. It is worth repeating that this has already happened – the government proposals against which we are protesting are addition to this.

And finally, since the TPS has been set up, 44 billion pounds more has been paid in to the scheme than has been paid out.

After the Proposals:

So, after the proposals – we will pay on average 3% more a month, representing a loss to monthly income at a time of frozen pay and raising inflation. We will be expected to work longer to get the full pension, and so therefore if retire “early” due to exhaustion or illness – before the age of 68 – will not be entitled to our full deal. And remember the 15% loss to the pot!

Using the NUT pension calculator I can see the difference to me when I retire in quality of life. I had a vague hope that in my retirement I will be able to eat well, be sheltered, be warm, be able to travel occasionally, still support my children in times of emergency, buy presents for children and hopefully grandchildren, go to the theatre, restaurants, holiday occasionally. I understand that I won’t be able to do that all the time, but to be able to do that some of the time I see as a reward for a lifetime of hard work. Really hard work, which I have educated myself to be able to do, and take on all kinds of pressure to constantly improve. Work I do for 10 or 11 hours a day in a job I love. I am exhausted by the end of every week, but I weigh this against the personal satisfaction I gain. My profession has been good to me and I want to be comfortable when I have finished. I don’t want to have to worry about poverty, about food bills, about fuel costs. I wonder if anyone reading thinks I am expecting too much? I look at my peers who work in finance, in IT, in the media, and I know they won’t have these worries. The proposed reforms will mean I not only cannot afford a choice of lifestyle on retirement, but I have 8 less years of it. I just can’t accept that this has to happen. It is a really, really big deal to me, and makes me think very carefully about the balance I have currently chosen to have in my life. Why continue to give everything when your reward has been so drastically and unilaterally reduced? How can you carry on the same when the terms of the deal you started with are just torn up and thrown out?

There is some qualification of our pension deal by comparing it to private sector pensions – this only masks the even bigger crisis that people in the private sector face – 2 thirds of whom do not have pension deals at all, the rest of whom have seen the value of theirs slashed. We have millions of people being carried into old age on a conveyor belt of poverty that is only going to place an even bigger strain on the state. In France twice as much is spent on pensions. In Germany two thirds as much. The only EU countries that currently have higher rates of pensioner poverty than the UK are Estonia and Cyprus. This is the 6th biggest economy in the world – putting millions of elderly people into poverty has been a political choice. This government is choosing to vastly increase this number. These reforms attempt to match the misery of public sector workers to those within the private sector as a solution to this problem.

Ultimately the chancellor has nailed his colours to the mast by pledging to reduce the deficit within one term. The economy hasn’t grown to help him close the gap. He can’t take on the wealthy in society with tax increases, or go after the banks, as these are the forces that propelled his party into government, through voting and funding. So he has to find the money somewhere – and the section of society that works in the public sector, that is a member of a trade union, is the section of society that by and large didn’t and won’t vote for his party. He has nothing to lose by alienating us further. So again there is a self evident political logic to this course of action. There is no question of a fair course of action, only a desperate one.

Taking action is a way of fighting back, and it is effective. They have already scrambled to make concessions to the deal in an attempt to avoid strikes. There are 33 unions in total calling their members out, representing 2.6 million working people. This is a moment of resistance against another manifestation of government that protects the rich and attacks the vulnerable. Across the world people are taking to the streets against this unfairness, and we must take our turn too. I hope those who aren’t striking understand this.

Gove’s Measures

Michael Gove has been talking about giving teachers greater powers to use force, to search student’s bags, and to issue detentions without parental contact, as a mean to “restore authority” to teachers. He is even going to make it easier for ex-service personnel to become teachers in an extension of this ideology. The language used to describe these measures harks back to an older, half remembered model of education and authority that my father would recognise. But this agenda is pushed without stressing the duty of care that comes with it, the need for those in authority to carry conviction in their roles and a deep care for learning. The good teachers, the inspirational figures, the totems of respect from my father’s age of schooling did not build their authority through fear of punishment, they built it from their principles, their commitment to teaching and passion for learning. And in that respect nothing has changed from then to now. There are many teachers in all the schools I have taught who are respected, there are some who are feared and there are plenty who inspire. They are taken seriously by their students because they take their responsibility seriously. They listen to young people and they give them the direction they ask for.

Cameron’s Lectures on Responsibility

Cameron spoke to Parliament about failures of responsibility in a “sick society”. Responsibility is the defining feature of great teachers in any age: it means they care about what happens. I avoid using the language of consequence here deliberately – consequences can be direct or indirect, and lie close to blame, which often involves a negation of responsibility. If my actions have negative outcomes, however unintended, I can take responsibility without taking blame. I think this is an important distinction – responsibility causes me to think again, it causes me to face up to what happens, and is integral to learn from mistakes. If I know something negative will happen as a result of my actions, I will take responsibility to change my course of action. However, if I am irresponsible I can figure out that even if the consequences of my actions are negative, if I can avoid facing them, I may do it anyway. If what I do hurts you, even if I did not mean for it to do so, I will face up to it and I will apologise. I want you to know that I did not mean it, but I also want you to know that I accept that damage has been done. I will let you have your pain. I will let you cast blame where you will.

Much of the unrest in society comes from our fears about the economy, about cuts to services, about jobs, about housing, about deficits, about foreigners, about change. This government has exacerbated people’s fear in these situations. This government has deliberately taken a course that reduces the quality of people’s lives. They are riding on a narrative of necessary damage, a radical surgery designed to cure us of our financial problems, a long term solution. Even if we do not blame our leaders directly for events of the last few days, they must accept responsibility for what has happened. They must hammer out that message of responsibility to business leaders, the city, the media, to police, to the twitching commentators, and they must stop lecturing the poor and disenfranchised. Responsibility is not a burden to be borne by the desperate only.

Some weeks ago a fund raising concert was organised by students in my school. At 7:00 about 200 of them made their way out of our school gates and towards Lewisham. The teachers, myself included, stayed behind to clear up, ensure the building was empty and locked up. On our way out a police car drove up to the school gates. The officers explained their colleagues had detained a number of our students down the hill. We went to investigate and to castigate. My first thought was shame – how could we have been so negligent as to let them walk down the hill and to their homes without supervision? As we approached the site, we saw a riot van and 5 to 6 officers. Our students had mostly dispersed by then. The officer in charge answered our concerns with a smile – he explained they had carried out 4 or 5 searches and had found nothing but a mild case of abuse from our young people – but we were not to worry, as he had experienced far worse. I was relieved – but what had they done? Nothing. A local resident had heard the group and felt nervous, so called the police. It was 7:00 on a bright summer’s evening and they had responded with 5 to 6 officers in a van. They had found nothing in their searches, and recognised our students had been unfairly victimised to satisfy the groundless worries of a neighbour. Would this have happened had they been piling out from the private school up the road? Perhaps not.

Who is to blame? The caller? The police? Other teenage gang members? Black people who have committed crimes in the past? None of them – but they share responsibility, and for all the repetitions and variations of this situation that play out daily across our cities. Because we all have a duty of care for those who we live with and we need to care about what happens. Teachers who fail to understand this relationship struggle to teach. Our government’s failure to understand their responsibility is at the heart of their failure to govern, and is why, for large sections of society, they have lost their mandate to do so. Unfortunately, failing teachers often stay in the classroom, breeding discontent and resentment – as this government will for every day it remains in power. Cameron’s response to the unrest over the last few days is designed to punish, but as long as his government fail to take responsibility for those they want punished, our society will not be lead to change.

And who does not have responsibility? Those young people, who were wrongly suspected and searched, and had done nothing to deserve it.

The Bigger Picture

I disagree with a direct causal link between cuts to public services and these riots. I do not think that because youth groups have been closed, young people simply started to riot. However, I do think that the nature and severity of the cuts in general have lead young people to believe they live in a society where those in power are hostile to their needs, for the following reasons:

1. Public sector cuts to local services – particularly in the hardest hit areas, with examples of high number of youth clubs closing, job centres, youth employment programmes, and community support programmes. I don’t think it is the lack of these services that has caused the unrest, but the feeling that the government has no place for young people in their agenda, and that they are being left to their own devices – that these things were there to help those communities, but now that help is being withdrawn.
2. National cuts that effect young people – particularly the EMA grant that enabled many young people to attend post-16 education, and the huge increase in University tuition fees. For the poorest young people, these two cuts effectively ended their aspirations. Suddenly, massive sections of the population feel they will not be able to afford to go to University. You compound that by the number of immigrant families who have come to the UK with the promise of education for their children – suddenly, their whole reason for living here, for working as hard as they do, is gone. And again, there is a perception that the government is actively against these people. This is reinforced by the widely held contempt for young people with no aspiration- as though it is their fault. We have spent their whole lives telling them that they can be who they want to be, that they had unlimited opportunities open to them, if they only worked for them – and now we have suddenly told them they don’t. We can’t do this to people and expect no consequence.
3. The impossibility of owning a house – prices in inner city areas all across the UK have become hopelessly out of reach for the vast majority of the population. Average price for a 1 bedroom apartment in London is about £250,00. You will not get anywhere near a mortgage for more than 3 or 4 times your annual salary. The average salary in the UK is £25,000 a year. And when you factor in the need for a deposit, or a bigger living space, you suddenly have a generation of people starting their adult lives with no prospect of ever owning their own property, as the promise of home ownership has been broken for millions of people. And no-one can tell them what to do about it.

The tinder box to this is the fact that those that already have money and power still have access to those things that are now out of reach of the poor. As an adult, I find that hard to take, but imagine how much worse it is for a young person – where what you have now has not been decided by your own ability or work, but is based on the amount of capital your parents have.

The Consumer Riots

Some points that have struck me -

1. The main point of the unrest seems to be to loot shops. It is amazing how they are choosing which shops to loot – electrical products, trainers, video games and clothes are highest on the list. Children are going in and simply taking the products that they want. There has been a lot of damage to banks and betting shops, displaying the strange naivete of the looters, who probably aren’t aware that no money is kept these places overnight.
2. According to police, most of the looters are school-age children. They have been reluctant to use force largely because of the age of the participants – the decision to use a water cannon on an 11 year old is a pretty tough one, I would imagine.
3. The rioting is much less a direct action against the government, or an act of specific political protest, but a consumer smash and grab. They want these things, so they are going to get them.
4. They are “organised” by text messages urging people to take what they want, and that because many others will be doing the same, the police will be overcome.
5. The children are throwing rocks, bricks etc at the police and clearly loathe them and enjoy goading them.

It is difficult to read much of a political agenda here. Instead, this is an expression of greed, of lack of respect for authority, and an absence of civic or moral duty. A political reading that focuses on the reasons for this would be accurate, but one that equates this with attempt to oppose specific government policy is less so.

My Experience of Young People in London

I teach in an inner city school. Mine and my colleagues preoccupation is very often the behaviour of the young people we teach, and how to manage it to produce a positive learning environment. I am proud to say that we do so quite well, that our school is a safe and positive place, and the young people in it are generally proud to work hard, are valued and are driven to learn. It is not a socially mixed school – a legacy of league tables and false choices in education mean that all London schools are highly socially stratified, and the majority of our children are from deprived inner city neighbourhoods. We deal with challenging behaviour with a restorative model, and voice is given to all parties with concerns. This is common in schools like mine, it works very well to foster a sense of respect and patience with each other in our school community. The sense of empowerment and the feeling of entitlement to question authority it fosters in young people in a wider sense is perhaps not without consequence, though I feel these consequences can only be positive. What happens, though, to our students when they leave school and find they don’t have the voice they were promised?

The most common complaints heard by children are variants on the following:

• Teachers want respect, but they don’t respect us.
• We misbehave in that class because the teacher can’t control us.
• That teacher never listens to what we say.
• I mess around because it’s fun. I don’t care about learning, I want to have fun.
• I didn’t do it. Or, at least, no-one saw me do it, so no-one has a right to tell me off.
• Yeah but everyone else did the same thing it and you didn’t say anything.
• I don’t agree that that is fair, so I won’t accept my punishment.

The single biggest challenge is communicating to young people the idea that their actions impact on others – that it might be an idea to behave just because it makes other people’s lives more pleasant! There is no culture of looking after your peer’s learning and respecting their right to it, let alone that your teacher is a person with feelings and should be protected from the hurt that you might be causing them. There is no feeling that a classroom, a school, is a society that they belong to, and that they are part of the collective that makes that society. Society is something that happens to other people

I am astonished by how many students also struggle to make a connection between learning in school and success. The idea that there is a real and unavoidable link between success and hard work is something that needs to be reinforced constantly. A danger is when this is linked to failure – to tell young people that they will fail if they do not try and learn – as this destroys respect and leads them to feel branded as failures. A tricky tight rope to walk!

In my classes children behave because they know there are consequences if they do not. I want to move them beyond this – and in good groups, I do – to a stage where they behave because it is simply the right thing to do for the group they are a part of.

Society

Another thing that really hits home about the riots – these people are only following suit with other sectors of our society. Journalists hacking phones, bankers selling bad credit, MP’s fiddling their expenses, senior policemen colluding in phone hacking , all without any visible consequence or erosion of power from these entities – have the following in common:

1. A number of people committing the wrong doing at the same time – a comfort in mass wrong doing, with the idea that if everyone does it, it is OK.
2. Particularly selfish motivations for each action.
3. No sense of having a responsibility for the consequences your actions have on the society you live in, or that these possible consequences should inform the decisions you make.
4. An abuse of power and the possibilities that power has given to you.

In this way, the actions of young people in the last couple of days have far more in common with journalists and politicians in the country than, they have for example, with their parent’s generation rioting against racial mistreatment. What has also been significant is the unrepentant attitudes held by those who have been caught in wrong doing – although they are sorry they will be punished, there never seems to be any real admission of culpability or transgression.

This also leads to a terrifying analysis – the actions of these young people are in line with the society they live in – where everyone is perceived to act according only to the rules of naked self interest, why should we expect young people not to do the same? Where politicians, journalists, bankers are giving us the message that personal greed should take precedence over anything else, what else did we think our young people would learn? After all, the powerful have done it without any loss of power. And when you perceive that you live in a society that is loaded against you, that authority is remote and absolute, that the powerful act with impunity and your voice is not heard, their actions this week reveal themselves as a response to the conditions in which they live, and a howl of rage against a future that has been decided for them.