If you’re a worker born after 1969 you’ll be delighted to learn that Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is thinking of announcing for the March budget that the official retirement age, set to rise to 68 in 2046, may now take effect in 2035.

Wondering how the state was going to pay the huge pandemic bill? It’s not, you are, by working longer and saving the state billions in pension payments. And this despite life expectancy not rising but falling since 2020.

Think that’s bad? Iain Duncan-Smith’s think-tank (which first proposed Universal Credit) wants to raise the pension age to 75.

There is a better solution – abolish capitalism.

Dementia is a growth market, rising from 900,000 today to 1.6 million predicted to be suffering by 2040.

Gordon Sanders who owns Runwood Homes, a care home business, paid himself £21m in five years. He owns a mansion in Essex (£4m) and a flat in London’s Knightsbridge (£4.7m). In the last two years, the company made £43m profit on turnover of £301m – a 14 percent margin. The five largest care home chains made £578m in profit in 2020 – a 22 percent average return

Helen Wildbore of the Relatives & Residents Association, said: ‘Supporting people affected by dementia should be an honour and a privilege, not a way to make millions. This highlights the sad reality of care as a commodity…’ bit.ly/3iPo7UI.

Oxfam’s latest report, ‘Survival of the Richest’, confirms the old saying that money always goes to money.

Britain’s richest 685,000 now have more wealth than 48 million UK people combined. The richest 1% of Irish people have more than a quarter of the country’s wealth and they gained 70 times more wealth than the bottom 50% in the last 10 years.

Oxfam Ireland said, ’This rising wealth at the top and rising poverty for the rest are two sides of the same coin, proof that our economic system is functioning exactly how the rich and powerful designed it to…’ (Independent).

Yes, the system works. Just not for the likes of you.

Don’t throw petrol on a burning fire seems like sensible advice. Don’t poke the bear seems to be also good advice but one that Western ‘leaders’ seem determined to ignore. News that France is to supply Ukraine with AMX-10 RC light tanks, while the UK plans to send Chieftains, is disturbing, while plans by the USA and Germany to send the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the Marder Infantry Fighting Vehicle are even more so.

At what point will Russia consider western states have openly declared war on them and respond accordingly?

The Socialist Party has been, since 1904, consistent in its opposition to armed conflict. The question is, who does the continuing conflict between Russia and Ukraine benefit? Answer, not the working class of either state.