LETTER: I worry for future of my children

I am an 87-year-old, living alone on my old age pension, and in this dreadful lockdown situation, people like me rely on TV all of my waking hours. I have enjoyed TV without cost, until Boris has now decided to take away my free service so I have to find £157.50.

Of course this is nothing to a man who had to apologise to Parliament for failing to declare £50,000, but to people like me it’s making my life more difficult.

I am old enough to remember the blitz of 1940 and 1941, of the area of Birmingham I lived in, and the terrible shortages of all essentials we needed, to allow us to survive, the average weekly wage at that time was £7 per week for men like my father, so we had to live on the rations we were allowed.

Of course this only applied to you, if you were in the poorer working classes.

My mother did cleaning at a local pub, and was able to see how the family at the pub were able to buy anything they needed, on the “black market” a system of crooks that supported the well off.

When I started work at 15 in 1948 as an apprentice fabricator welder, my wage was £1 per week less stoppages for 44 hours per week.

I worked in midland factories, for more than 50 years, paying my taxes by my employers taking what I owed from my weekly wages.

I believe the free licence we old folk were given was well deserved, if it was necessary to raise money, I feel it would have been fairer to raise the fee paid by wage earners by a few pounds, rather than taking this amount of money out of pensions of old age pensioners.

I can remember the Attlee government of my childhood , who created the NHS, despite our country at that time being in debt all over the world due to our fight to defeat Hitler, prior to this we would take a cap round the street to raise the money for a child needing a doctor.

There was terrific opposition to the creation of the NHS but those wonderful politicians of the Attlee government did a fantastic job.

Compare that with what Boris is doing to us during the past couple of years, I believe Brexit is a disaster, let’s not forget that 13,000,000, voters didn’t bother to vote, so must have been happy to remain.

We now have the pandemic, I really worry for my children and grandchildren’s future, with the people we now have ruling us.

Andrew Hadley, Bewdley

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