As you sail into Stromness you cannot miss the stack of red rock that stands like an old man staggering on the edge of the island of Hoy ready to fall into the sea.
He is 137 metres tall and about 250 years old. In recent years, men, women, girls and boys have had the temerity to climb him, beginning with Chris Bonington in 1966. He climbed the Old Man again in 2014 to mark his 80th birthday.
I mention this because old age has been in the news this week with Andy Burnham talking of scrapping the triple lock on pensions to pay for social care in England and Wales. Of course, we have had free nursing and personal care in Scotland since 2002 and John Swinney doesn’t think much of the idea of cutting pensions in Scotland to pay for free personal care in England and Wales.
Ending the triple lock was the centre-piece of Burnham’s first speech as prime minister to the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool. The idea is to reduce the state pension bill from a budget-breaking £150bn a year by dropping the link with average earnings. But it would still be linked to inflation or 2.5%, whichever is the higher. It’s thought this would result in £15bn of savings, which would go to providing free nursing and personal care. In Scotland this amounts to around £260 a week, spent either in the home of those who need it or as a contribution to their nursing home charges. And here it costs the Scottish government £1bn a year.
The problem is that these costs will soar as the population grows older. And so will the pension bill as people live longer. My own solution would be to target the state pension on those who really need it and use the savings to cope with the rising care bill. This, of course, is too radical for the likes of please-them-all Andy Burnham. But at least he is moving in the right direction. And I hope he can persuade his older voters to accept some sacrifices to pay for their own care and release money for the younger generation.
The truth is that we in the older generation have never had it so good, yet the younger generation have seldom had it so bad. We are not giving them satisfying jobs, they can’t afford to buy a house, and the education system is chronically under-funded.
As I write, hundreds of university lecturers in Edinburgh, Glasow and Dundee are on strike over job-cuts. The 19 universities as a whole are £200m short of funds. They have become over-reliant on foreign students paying large fees. The 24 vocational colleges have had their budgets cut by 20 per cent over the last five years. Student numbers have fallen by 40,000 in the last two years. This is hardly preparing young people for long-term tax-paying careers, not to mention the quality of their lives.
Other messages coming out of the Liverpool conference were even weaker. The Chancellor John Healey had little to say except he wants to fund three new dry-docks for the nuclear submarine base at Faslane on the Clyde. The strange hope is they will be built on the other side of the country, at Rosyth. And as for the new Scottish Labour leader Michael Marra, he promised to make the Scottish education system “the best in the world.” No one asked him “how”.
Meanwhile a Labour amendment in the Scottish parliament managed to defeat the Conservatives’ suggestion that the UK government should open up the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea and the Rosebank oil field west of Shetland. Instead, Labour said the decision should be left to the UK energy secretary “through a quasi-judicial process.” Who are they kidding? The opening up of new oil fields is one of the defining political decisions of our times. So much for clear honest leadership.
The one thing Scotland seems to be pretty good at is writing crime novels. This week we lost one of the art’s Old Men, James May who has died at the age of 74. He was most famous for his Lewis Trilogy set in the Western Isles but he also based his stories in France, Spain and China and most recently in St Kilda. Over 15 million copies of his books were sold around the world and he joins Ian Rankin, Val McDermid and William McIlvanney in our crime writer’s hall of fame.
I don’t myself read crime novels – I don’t like the actual crimes involved – but I’m told they explore the worlds of geography and personality and surprise which bring pleasure to millions. But please, let’s not have a crime novel involving the Old Man of Hoy. Let him sleep in peace.
