A fool and his money

The anger of the dispossessed

Bernard Hollowood

I am middle class — all right, lower upper middle class — and angry. But not really for the reasons stated so eloquently in a recent Times leader. I am angry because having worked hard for decades and having saved for a rainy day I now approach retirement in a blue funk.

Mind you, I don't agree with 'The Anger of the Middle Class' when it says that it is every man's right to build "a continuous family through generations of time": that's going too far — for reasons that I will try to explain anon. But have always considered it reasonable that a man should be able to save enough money during his working life to assure himself and his wife of a comfortable old age. That, as I see it, is the essential social contract.

I would cheerfully put my case to arbitration. .

Judge X: Your argument is this, I take it — that for many years you abstained from spending on luxuries in order to acquire the wherewithal to live out your declining years in comfort. At the age of sixty-five you plan to become unproductive, but you feel that younger people, those still producing goods and services, should recognise the credit you have built up (by reason of past abstention) and honour it by supplying you with food, clothes, fuel, entertainment and medical aid. Am

I correct?

Hollowood: Yes, I'm not asking for very much. If hive to be eighty I shall need fifteen years of help, and I think I've earned it.

Judge: I have two questions to put to you. You say that you have a claim on the country's productive resources: may I ask whether this claim can be substantiated? I take it that you have acquired a surplus of legal tender?

Hollowood: Well, yes, I did. Three years ago I considered myself safe. My savings were then sufficient to see me through to the grave. Unfortunately, I was advised to put my savings into equities. .

Judge: Who advised you?

Hollowood: My tax accountant, every financial tipster in the newspapers and magazines and a number of politicians of both left and right. They told me I was a fool to keep my money on deposit at the bank, in building societies or National Savings. They told me that industry needed new capital and that the purchase of equities would in the long run help in the regeneration of British industry.

Judge: But surely, as a man of the world, you knew that ordinary shares fluctuate in value. I suggest that you were being greedy, trying to cash in on a stock market boom?

Hollowood: Maybe there was a soupcon of greed. but only a trace, mind. All the companies in which I

invested were blue chips, supposedly as safe as houses. Unfortunately, my shares are now worth only 30 per cent of what I paid for them. No, 25 per cent would be nearer.

Judge: Now I come to my second question. You were able to save because you earned good money. Right? Well, it may interest you to know that many people consider you were grossly overpaid and had no right to your hoard of savings. Do you admit you were overpaid?

Hollowood: No, I tell you I worked hard for a modest salary and modest fees. I was never in a very high income bracket. I saved by going without.

No fancy holidays, no posh cars. I bought few clothes and very seldom dined out.

Judge: Nevertheless, I believe you earned four or five times the average wage in Britain — for many years. And I repeat, there are many who feel that such inequality cannot be justified.

Hollowood: Look, sir, I'm a „reasonable chap. I disagree when the Times says that a man ought to be able to build "a continuous family through generations of time". I don't see why future generations should slave to keep my children in idleness and/or luxury, In fact I agree with both the Conservatives and the socialists when they tax inherited wealth, and it wouldn't offend my principles if they taxed private wealth clean out of existence on the demise of its owner and begetter. If I were poor — which I now am — I should be sickened to think that my children would have to work to support a lot of the idle rich. It's nothing less than criminal that the pool of goods and services produced should be raided by people who contribute nothing to that pool.

Judge: Except in your own case, eh? Here you are claiming a comfortable old age when you've got precious little to show for your past endeavours as a producer and saver.

Hollowood: I've got a dozen books, thousands of essays and articles as proof of my above-average productivity.

Judge: But precious little of the ready. If I were to grant your appeal, I should be bombarded by similar applicants. There'd be thousands who'd lost their money on the stock market and millions who'd claim that they'd never been able to save because their incomes had always been too low. If I were you I should count my blessings. After all, you've still got your equities and they must bring in some kind of income.

Hollowood: Which is heavily taxed and retaxed, and the residue is called "unearned income".

Judge: You've admitted that it is. No, sorry, I was forgetting: you regard other people's dividends as unearned, your own as earned.

Hollowood: Only during my lifetime. I thought I'd explained that.

Judge: And where, d'you suppose, has your money gone?

Hollowood: Search me! A lot of it's disappeared in higher wages and salaries, some in higher pensions and some must have gone into the pockets of the clever rogues who always profit from inflation.

Judge; Surely you're not grumbling about higher state pensions!

Hollowood: Well, no, not really. But it's a bit thick to have to share one's own pension fund — my savings — with a lot of people who've spent every penny they've earned on riotous living.

Judge: You sound exactly like a really stuffy backwoodsman peer. I can only suppose that what you want is a government subsidy for equities. You'd like the ordinary working man to fork out extra tax in order to bolster your holdings of ordinary shares. Am I right?

Hollowood: Everything else seems to be subsidised. I honestly don't see why. . .

Judge: Ap,1^-A dismissed. Next case. please .. .

Bernard Hollowood, formerly editor of Punch writes this column weekly in The Spectator