If Starmer gets his way with the state pension, some people won’t even get it as they’ll already be dead

Outrage has erupted across social media after reports suggest that Keir Starmer could raise the state pension age to 74. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) found under its narrow perimeters that the state pension age would need to rise to the mid seventies by 2068 in order to keep the triple lock intact. That’s without looking at the wider inequalities that mean one in six people have literally zero savings while 39% have £1,000 or less. At the same time, the richest 1% of Britons hold more wealth than 70% of the country.

State pension outrage

The super rich are then buying up all the housing, rebranding it as an ‘asset’ and renting it out at astronomical costs or lending at high mortgage rates to the rest of the nation. That led work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall to admit, as she announced a pension review in London, that:

If you are paying off your mortgage in retirement or still renting in retirement, that is what is driving this tsunami of pensioner poverty that I think is coming our way.

But apparently the solution is to make less people pensioners by raising the state pension age. And to introduce just 90,000 social homes over this parliament while there’s already a waiting list of 1.3m households.

UK pensions are also already rock bottom in comparison to the developed world. The state pension in the UK is an average of 29% of what the person was previously earning, the worst in the OECD. The OECD average is 63%, while countries such as the Netherlands and Italy have rates of 80%.

Work until you drop

So predictably people are angry with further austerity under a red banner:

The pension age of 67, proposed for next year, is too high especially for those in manual jobs.
74 would be ludicrous. Many would never see retirement and sickness benefit claims would rocket.
Anyone with any sense can see this…so what is their game? https://t.co/vOpiMKGrPS

— Anne Greensmith 💙 (@snowleopardess) July 23, 2025

If anything the state pension age should be getting lower, not higher. Otherwise the system is failing on its own terms of gradual improvement.

On top of that, life expectancy fell to its lowest level for a decade in 2024, partly because of Covid but also as a result of austerity budgets and privatisation of the NHS. If the state pension age was to rise to 74, men would on average only receive it for four years. And it’s worse in some areas.

Male life expectancy in Glasgow is also 73, meaning if the pension age were to rise to 74 that the average Glaswegian man wouldn’t even claim a state pension.

There’s massive class injustices in these proposals, including the forms of work we’d be asking folk to do in their 70s. https://t.co/MiMuNiqvqd

— Ewan Gibbs (@ewangibbs) July 23, 2025

The idea people should do physically demanding jobs until they are 74 is also a problem. If one owns a bunch of assets that deliver a stream of passive (free) income, it’s all peaches and strawberries.

If we can no longer afford the state pension, what have they done with all the National Insurance money?

— Sir Norman of Nowhere. 🏴‍☠️ (@Normanjam67) July 22, 2025

The UK further has an aging population whereby the proportion of people over 65 will rise from 19% to 27% by 2072.

That said, tackling grotesque inequality should be the focus of the government – not making us all work until we drop dead.

Featured image via the Canary