Commentary and analysis on recent UK political events.

Following George Osborne’s Autumn statement there are warnings that the poor will be dead before they are able to retire.

Britain’s poor ‘will die before they retire’

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Plans to raise the basic state pension age to 70 for people currently in their twenties were laid out in the George Osborne’s Autumn Statement this week. But with male life expectancy at birth as low as 66 in some of the most deprived parts of the country, public health experts have warned that a “one size fits all” pension age risks condemning many to a life without retirement.

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The Mirror has an article on hypocritical Tories praising Mandela when years ago they opposed him, called him a terrorist and for him to be killed.

The ANC started bombing campaigns following the Sharpeville massacre which is regarded as a turning point in South African history.

[8/12/13 Mandela’s Paradoxes Made His Journey Even Greater

… [O]ur celebrity-focused culture virtually ignores the work of the rest of his colleagues during Mandela’s 27 years in prison (1963-1990) that ended Apartheid. The official media picture is as if a man went to jail and solely by example toppled an entrenched system of mandatory racial segregation. That’s not at all how it happened. The organizing – and, in particular, the evolution of it – by so many others remains one of the epic collective heroic stories of the twentieth century.

… Mandela’s absolutely unique evolution on questions of violence and nonviolence and their efficacy in struggle. Mandela began, by his own words, as an expressly Gandhian leader. “I followed the Gandhian strategy for as long as I could,” he later reflected, “but then there came a point in our struggle when the brute force of the oppressor could no longer be countered through passive resistance alone.” He then helped lead the military wing of the movement, received training in guerrilla warfare and sabotage in Algeria, and was arrested when back in his own country for that activity. He was kept in prison longer than his original five-year sentence precisely because he refused to renounce armed struggle, right up through his release in 1990.]

Nelson Mandela dead: Conservative ”hypocrites” heap praise on man they branded a terrorist

1990: ANC’s Heritage–Nonviolence to Guerrilla Attacks : Tactics: The anti-apartheid group is under pressure to negotiate. But many young members are impatient.