One major advantage of being over 60 is the wonderful Freedom Pass that offers older people – and those with disabilities – free travel the length and breadth of London. Those who reached 60 before April 2010 got them automatically – but the threshold is being incrementally increased so that eventually you’ll need to be 65 to qualify. This upper age was originally going to be reached in 2020, but last year’s government spending review plans to bring it forward to 2018.
Before getting my Freedom Pass I had a standard Oystercard with auto topup – itself a brilliantly hassle-free way of getting around the capital. Since I’m still in gainful fulltime employment, it was morally a tad dubious to take up this chance of free subsidised travel. So by way of a sop to my conscience, my old Oystercard has passed to an old friend in straitened circumstances whose travel around London I now pay for instead of my own.
After all, as that fine songwriter TV Smith (formerly of The Adverts) once put it – and as I well remember from signing on in the 70s – it’s expensive being poor.
TV Smith. Photo by Tales from Bradistan
Also, the poor have a right to the wealth accrued by the richer. Those higher up the social ladder will get more than their share and need to hand a bit back.
“We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer, ‘To hell with them’. The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do.”
– Michael Foot