Toby on Tuesday 

'Inequitable Life'

 

7.00pm this evening will see the very last public event of our campaign when we hold our pre-Eve of Poll Meeting at Malton’s Milton Rooms. Let’s hope for a good turnout for a vintage occasion at which everyone, including the Press, will be welcome. We can all celebrate the birth of our new Princess, have a traditional election speech and, all being well, some lively questions. With the help of our truly superb UKIP Thirsk and Malton team, what I have tried to do all through this campaign is to combine the new social media, like this blog and our website, with very traditional electioneering, speaking at countless hustings and actually meeting and talking to people.

High points of the past few days have included visits to Malton’s Jack Berry House, an astonishing new facility for injured jockeys and the wider Malton community, inspired by the legendary racehorse trainer, Jack Berry, to a centre in Easingwold enabling the severely disabled to enjoy productive work run by the inspirational Mark Johnson, to Colin Badgery’s fascinating Thirsk Birds of Prey Centre, among the constituency’s most remarkable visitor attractions, and of course last Wednesday to Leeds Arena for BBC1’s Yorkshire television debate.

But the meeting that has in many ways made the deepest impression, as evidence of the cynical way in which we are governed, has been with the representatives of the Equitable Life Assurance Society’s policy holders. As a direct result of Government maladministration, they have effectively had a total of some £2.8 billion stolen from their pensions. The background to this is that, despite holding some £26 billion of savers’ funds, the Society, like the banks, had accumulated immense unhedged liabilities that it was unable to meet. In 2000, it closed to new business and slashed payouts to its million or so policy holders, of whom several hundred live in the constituency. As the regulator of the Society, the Treasury was directly responsible for this fiasco but from the start was determined to evade responsibility.
A series of public enquiries and Parliamentary debates followed. In July 2008 the Parliamentary ombudsman, Ann Abraham, published her report in which the Treasury was found guilty of regulatory maladministration. It also emerged that on “data protection grounds” the Treasury had destroyed the details of 353,000 policy holders, rather as in an entirely separate scandal potentially embarrassing files had gone missing from the Home Office. At the 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review, George Osborne accepted her finding that the total loss suffered by the Society’s policy holders amounted to £4.3 billion. However, due to “affordability constraints”, their compensation was limited to £1.5 billion only, leaving the balance due of £2.8 billion in the greedy hands of the Treasury.

The truth is that the Treasury saw the Society’s policy holders as elderly, respectable people unlikely to make a fuss. They were not, unlike the bankers who obtained 100% support from the Government, “too big to fail”. By virtue of their being pensioners, time would in due course take its toll and relieve the Treasury of its responsibilities. They had been prudent, careful and thrifty and so could go hang in the warped world of modern politics, where those who shout loudest and cause most trouble actually prevail. I was pleased to be able to tell the policy holders’ representatives that, if successful on 7th May, I would take their cause to my heart and make it my own. But then we are surrounded by instances of bad government – we will see this on a global scale tomorrow when Greece, bankrupted by its membership of the Euro, is due to pay a further $200 million to the IMF, a sum that it just does not have. We must brace ourselves for the contagion that, as night follows day, will surely occur throughout the Eurozone.

Perhaps the only wise decision made by our own politicians in the past generation has been to keep the Pound and avoid the Euro. The presence of UKIP has in large measure secured this policy and our influence will only grow in the years ahead. And on Thursday, let’s get the vote out and ensure that the whole constituency is painted purple. So until next Tuesday, when we’ll know the result and there’ll be a chance to thank our truly wonderful team at UKIP Thirsk and Malton!

Until next Tuesday!
Toby