The Forgotten Legion of Pensioners

From Yorkshire Post
by JE Faulkner, Fen Lane, Mareham le Fen, Boston, Lincolnshire.

I REALLY feel it is time that people are aware of a certain large number of people that are badly overlooked by everyone in the "dash for cash" that is developing rapidly in this wonderful country of ours.We have to go to the same supermarkets and shops, garages and filling stations as everyone else does. We don't have a trade union to hold us all together and strike, it would be devastating if we did.

We, or a lot of us, are still paying income tax because we have been prudent in the past for our future. We are finding that prudence of ours rapidly diminishing due to tax and yet more tax, expensive food, expensive petrol and diesel and our increasing energy prices.

Who are "we", you might ask. "We" are the forgotten legion of pensioners in this country who have been forgotten by successive governments or who paid us a 25p increase in our state pension. If "grey power" could be organised countrywide somehow, it would woe betide the government who treated us with the contempt we now have to endure.

Little attention is paid to us until hundreds start to die due to cold weather when it is either heat or eat. Only then do people become aware of the pensioner's plight and sympathise but that sympathy quickly evaporates.