Introduction:
By the time you have read this I would have carried out a promise to address the Caribbean elders of the Pepperpot club in what we used to call Ladbroke Grove in West London, which pompous estate agents have now renamed Notting Hill.These people are warriors, pioneers, unrecognised in their countries of birth and treated with disdain in their adopted home, Britain.
These are people who came to Britain in the early post-war years to labour in Lyons tea shops, the national health service, the army, and most of all on London Transport, because they wanted a better life.They are almost all now in their late 70s and 80s, ill-treated by the local Kensington and Chelsea local authority, the wealthiest in Britain, who want to deprive them of even the opportunity to meet in their lunch club to swap anecdotes and a few laughs until the good Lord calls them home.
These are people who left the sun-drench Caribbean to get out of their beds in a snow-covered city to look after the thankless patients, sweep tube platforms while remaining invisible to passengers, make breakfast in working men’s canteens for a pittance, all the while sending money back home to their loved ones to feed and clothe them and to repay the cost of their travel to Europe. These are the pioneers that two of our prime ministers – one BLP and one DLP – are on record as saying did not make any contribution to the nation.Now, with great reluctance, it is recognised that their remittances were the backbone of the foreign reserves in the 1960s that we now talk so much about. It will be a pleasure to talk to them, to share memories of being a young man in West London, birth place of the world-famous Notting Hill Carnival, that demonstration of street theatre that the British, especially the media and police, still find so hard to accept.The invitation to talk to them from the club’s chairman, Barbados-born Rudi Brathwaite (Kizerman), one of our brilliant authors, was so much appreciated that unusual for me, it has occupied my thoughts ever since then.
Black Elderly:
The black British elderly are in many ways at the forefront of the battle to regain some of our pride and place; along with young black men, they feel the force of an unforgiving society, one that has no appreciation of what they have suffered with silent dignity. In Britain we have an awful situation in which the state is using the excuse of the economic crisis to withdraw benefits from the poor and underprivileged and the major victims of this social holocaust are black people – young and old. Who speaks for us? Where is the generation to take over from these pioneering warriors who braved the weather and violent social climate, from Moseley’s black shirts in the 1950s to the Notting Hill Dale police throughout the 60s, just to put food on their children’s tables?
Elderly Poverty:
Most of all, these people are the real face of a growing global problem, pensioner poverty. People are now living longer, but not necessarily healthier or relatively prosperous lives. It is something that those of us who are pension nerds fully realise, but the basic arithmetic tells the story: people are living longer, but not necessarily healthier, lives. And, in a working culture in which they enter the workplace at the age of 21 (or 16 if they leave school without further education), and retiring at their mid to late 6os, after 45 to 50 years of working, their main long-term retirement income is from the state pension.
If they are lucky, they may top this up with an occupational pension. But all this is coming to an end since state pensions, in both developed and developing nations, are over-burdened. Since Bismarck, state pension schemes were designed with the assumption that beneficiaries will die either before they accessed their state pensions, or within two years or so of getting them. But, in contemporary society, the average person is retiring at 65 or so and living a further 20 years on state benefits. Further, in a pay-as-you-go system, in which the current generation of workers pay national insurance which goes towards the benefits of pensioners, the number of working people to pensioners is becoming unsustainable. The battle to design new long-term savings is one that has not yet been fully realised in Barbados by the policymakers and politicians. As the vast majority of Barbadians struggle on the breadline and the rich and powerful continue to enjoy life as if there is no tomorrow, it is rather interesting to take a further look at the gathering storms that threaten our social peace. As these dark clouds continue to build up, the DLP government, led by a helpless Freundel Stuart, continues to run around like a headless chicken while the leaderless people cry for help.
Youth Poverty:
But pensioner poverty is not the only social cancer tearing our society apart. Many of us are familiar with youth poverty, caused by poor education, prolonged periods of unemployment, ill health, single parent-hood and misfortune. There is also a abundance of economic and sociological evidence that a school leaver who falls in to long periods of unemployment without access to further education or skills training will most probably, throughout the rest of his/her life, live on the breadline. That is why it is so important to get young school leavers, who may not be at all academic, back in post-school skills training or in remedial education. The economic benefit to society and to the individual is simply incalculable. But one of the major causes of youth poverty in black communities throughout the western world is having single-parent families. To some young people, hormones running through their bodies, it may seem to be a freedom, even a democratic right to have children in their teens or 20s, especially women, often with the father not around. But having two pay cheques coming in to a home provides a security, ignoring for the time being the quality of the relationship, which gives confidence to the children. It is unlikely that both parents will lose their jobs at the same time and, as mature people, they can plan their home building and child rearing with the knowledge that at least one salary will be coming in to the home to provide food on the table.And, whatever the liberal view may say, marriage is the bond that keeps those two parents together in a way that unmarried relationships do not. At present, about 70 per cent of children born in Barbados are born to single parents; not to put too fine a point on it, this is scandalous, especially when we know often the fathers are likely to have children from other mothers, and the mothers to have children for other fathers. This is the social cocktail that makes poverty in later life almost guaranteed
Protection Insurance:
But there is one way many of us can hedge against such negative eventualities, protection insurance. Let us take life and home insurance companies, since that is the biggest corporate fraud in Barbados at present, and the conniving doctors who encourage them to rob their innocent policyholders. With the retreat of the state from providing a social safety net for those who have fallen on hard times, it is more important now than ever that individuals and families take out adequate protection insurance to cover themselves and family in the likelihood of unexpected misfortune. This can range from income protection, when a claimant who has lost his/her job can claim a percentage of their normal take-home pay for a period, usually up to six months. The idea is that if there is a sudden lost of job the policyholder would not suffer a fall in the standard of living during the time it may take to get a relatively similar job.
Next on the list is critical illness and private medical insurance, one covers for unexpected illnesses such as a stroke or heart attack, and the other for the gradual aches and pains of a weary body. But protection insurance is premised on the assumption of trust between the insurer and the insured, that when legitimate claims are made on the policy the insurer would not use fine print in the contract to avoid paying. Good governance, therefore, is the key, and it should be compulsory for companies to publish their claims records, how many have been honoured and how many denied.
For many of these companies, home, life and protection cover is just a milch cow, they take in money but are very reluctant to pay out. One major local insurance company has an excess of 33 per cent of the first Bds$60000 for the medical bill for policyholders aged over 35. What that means in real terms, is that if a policyholder develops a serious illness, such as cancer or stroke or heart attack and face a long period of medical treatment and recuperation, they must have access to an immediate Bds$21000.
So, if according to the CIA Factbook, the average salary in Barbados is BDS$25500, then ordinary people must have savings of $21000 just to cover medical costs, over and above their daily living. If so, then what is the purpose of insurance cover? But the fraudulence of insurance companies goes far beyond this to include conspiracy with the health authorities.
For example, private doctors treating their private clients (ie the PMI policyholders) in the QE Hospital, charge an average $500 to carry out a major operation, I am told, but pay the hospital authorities Bds$150 for the privilege. I am afraid, I am not too clever, but for the use of taxpayers’ funded hospital facilities, including an operation table and staff for surgery that may take the best part of a day, is $150 economic?
Then, if that patient has to have chemotherapy, for example, that comes at Bds$5000 for each treatment, with the first two free. I am told one senior trade unionist has just paid Bds$500000 for treatment to a close relative aged under 35, which carried a 20 per cent excess. So, he had to find Bds$100000. In this fair? To have a major illness in Barbados is a life sentence.
Annuities:
The other area of blatant insurance dishonesty is in annuity contracts. In simple terms, an annuity is a contract for life. So at a given period an annuitant enters in to a contract with an insurance company, say at age 65, with a pot of $100000, for which s/he accepts an annual income of $5000. If s/he dies the next day, too bad, the rest of the pot goes to the insurance company; however if s/he lives to be 100, then the company is the loser – they have to bear the burden of the extra $75000.
It is up to the company to invest that money to give them a decent return; the other way of recovering that cost, however, is what is called in the industry ‘smoothing’, which means the people who die prematurely pay for the ones who outlive the actuarial assumptions.That, basically, is what insurance is about, not picking the pockets of the poor and helpless as many foreign-owned, Barbados-based companies do. But, as with some annuitants, so-called variable annuities and other third-way annuities are often just new ways of robbery.Analysis and
Conclusion:
One of the age old problems with defining poverty is to separate relative from absolute poverty; it is like separating those who think they are poor, because they do not have dish-washers and the latest model of a popular car, from those who according to the United Nations live on US$1 a day. Using this measure, there is no real poverty in Barbados, or at the very least what there is statistically insignificant.
In modern societies, however, the persistence of poverty is a failure of government, of policy-making; in fact, what is often missing from the discussion about globalisation is that in the new environment there are winners and losers, both between nations and within nations, which is a monumental challenge facing politicians and policymakers. For those of us who are Barbadians, the great unarticulated promise of constitutional independence was the escape from poverty. This was the implicit settlement agreed at Marlborough House, that the black community will have political power while the local white community will retain business and economic power. Since then there has been a movement of overseas-born white people and other ethnic communities in that space, and political power has remained largely in the hands of the black community, but has failed to drive national development forward.
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