I've seen this tweet saying that a tory plan to raise the state pension age to 75 is "set to go through law" - I've been trying to handle my inner rage better lately and twitter news is a big contributor, so I thought I'd practise taking a beat with it (long thread...)

My brain’s instinct is to move on to the next tweet (the anger stays but what caused it doesn’t get looked at). So I made myself look at this one. My first thought was, shit, this is big news! Replies were understandably full of anger that it’s not all over the media.

The original tweet doesn’t include a source, so I checked the OP’s bio. Nothing about journalism or politics in there, so she’s unlikely to have access to official info that I don’t. If she can find it, so can I!

I like to pretend I’m basically Nancy Drew, so this was great news for me. Nancy doesn’t have google, but I do, and searching ‘pension age UK 75’ found this from @FullFact last yr (they are great): https://fullfact.org/economy/not-government-policy-state-pension/

A think tank advised moving the pension age to 75 in Aug 2019 but it wasn’t made government policy. That was in the news (I’ve seen a lot of those articles retweeted today as if they’ve just been published, despite being a year old).

I searched more recent news, looking for pensions stories on several major news sites. Learned some stuff about the NI troubles pensions, but nothing about raising the age to 75.

I don’t trust the tories not to adopt a cruel policy in the last year, but this one wouldn’t sit well with their key voters (older) and the tweet says it’s “set to go through law.”. If it *is* policy, there should be a record of it.

First off, I went to https://services.parliament.uk/bills/  to check bills currently going through parliament. There are a lot, so I just checked bills with pension in the title. There are 2.

Both originated in the House of Lords (they have an [HL] next to them) so they’re unlikely to be introducing a change like this - Lords bills tend to be more for detailed stuff based on specialist expertise. But it doesn’t hurt to check!

The Pensions (Amendment) Bill has this summary, so it’s probably not also going to tell us we can’t retire till 75:

The Pension Schemes Bill was a lot more vague. Its summary was just “A bill to make provision about pension schemes.” That would be weird for a bill that raises the state pension age, but, as I said, I don’t trust the tories and it doesn’t hurt to look.

The contents pages suggest this bill is mostly about administering pension schemes rather than who gets them, but just to check, I ctrl+F’d for 75. I found 81 results, all of which were page numbers, section numbers or article numbers. This isn’t it either.

So we know it’s not currently going through the legislature. Is it being proposed? Next, I went to https://www.gov.uk/official-documents to look at White Papers (government proposals for legislation it wants to pass).

I went all the way back to August 19, when Full Fact tells us raising the pension age to 75 wasn’t gov policy, and found 1 white paper about pensions, and 2 I thought could theoretically have pensions in them somewhere.

The first paper suggests letting public servants choose from 2 plans, the others didn’t talk about pensions or the number 75 at all. Now, for the widest possible interpretation of “set to go through law,” I had to go to the Conservative website to check their current policies.

Although they do reference “a new style of pension scheme which is more sustainable for workers and employers” in their manifesto (which can be taken however), they don’t say they’re planning to raise the age to 75 (unsurprising, as it doesn’t sound like a vote winner).

So why did the OP make this tweet that’s got so many people so worked up? Based on a later retweet, it seems her evidence on this is a Telegraph story from 2016, which says that various people are advising raising the pension age, but not that it’s set to become law.

I’m not sure if the OP is lying or just misguided, but I’m pretty sure most of the thousands of people who’ve liked, replied or retweeted it don’t know they’re sharing false information. That’s why media/internet literacy is so important, and why orgs like Full Fact matter.

It took me seconds to figure out this tweet was unreliable, and a few minutes to find out for sure it was untrue (please don’t ask how long I spent writing this thread...) but even if I didn’t outright believe it at first, it still made me angry. I still gave it emotional weight.

And why? Because the person who said it also hates the tories? I actually had fun looking into this but it’s also been a real reminder how much social media works to enrage.

There are structures of power in mainstream media that means some things only get traction due to grassroots sharing and reporting but I’m for sure going to be more aware of who’s posting, and remember that sometimes it’s on me to just chill for a minute when I see something bad.