Macron and Replacement Migration: How raising the pension age led to a French dictatorship—and why Britain is even worse off

by ALAN ASSISE Wednesday, 24th May 2023

French President Emmanuel Macron recently triggered Clause 49.3 of the French Constitution (applicable since 1958) to force a raising of the pension age from 62 to 64 without the consent of France’s parliament, the Assemblée Nationale. This is a form of governance otherwise known as dictatorship.

The likely reason why Macron has decided to risk so much political capital over such an unpopular and seemingly irrelevant policy is the role of retirement age to Agenda 2030 and the United Nations’ replacement migration policies. 

In 2000, the Population Division of the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs of published a document entitled Replacement Migration: Is it A Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations?. It set out a set of scenarios for the period down to 2050. It sought to address a purported ageing population crisis that will see a growing number of pensioners supported by a dwindling number of workers in developed countries.

The document sets out detailed proposals for mitigation of this bogeyman, in the form of drastically increasing the retirement age and vastly boosting migration from countries with young populations to countries with ageing populations. We have just seen this arbitrary UN policy impinging on Britain, too, after it was announced that the Government is considering delaying raising the pension age to 68 as a result of life expectancy falling during the pandemic period.

These arbitrary policies appear to be designed to incentivise countries to reduce life expectancy in place of the nurturing of families and protection of fertility. They encourage the erosion of retirement rights, to the benefit of the financial institutions and government finance. They are, moreover, a solution looking for a problem: they incentivise levels of migration at the national level to cause the outrage necessary for the UN to present global governance of migration as the answer, in line with Agenda 2030 target 10.7.

Source: UN DESA, 2000

Macron has been insisting that the retirement age rise to 64 only goes some of the way towards satisfying the UN’s extreme Scenario II, which demands that France raises its retirement age to 74 by 2050 if it fails to meet unachievable replacement migration targets. This sets up the false dialectic that if replacement migration is rejected, the retirement age must rise to unacceptable levels.

The UN is similarly demanding that the retirement age in the UK must rise to 72 by 2050 if replacement migration targets are not satisfied here. We have seen this play out over recent years, with the British Government using the Border Force and other organisations to facilitate small boat crossings of the English Channel, then quartering tens of thousands of undocumented migrants in hotels with full board at an annual cost of almost £2 billion. For the costs of the hotels alone, the climate change levy could be abolished, increasing British productivity so that we could instead fund family life and an ageing population.

As the policy of encouraging small boats has become a political hot potato, the Government has proposed steps to reduce illegal migration. It is, therefore, likely no coincidence that measures have been taken at the same time in the 2023 Spring Budget to encourage more pensioners to return to work, alongside removing barriers to investing more into pension funds. This is because the UN’s arbitrary replacement migration policies will require that any reduction of immigration levels must be responded to with enhanced erosion of retirement rights.

In the UK, we are in a much worse position than France. Our retirement age was 60 for women and 65 for men, rising to 65 in 1995—the very year that, in a remarkable coincidence, was the baseline date for the UN replacement migration projections. That age was then hiked to 66 by 2020 and is due to rise to 68 by 2028. However, we do see this ratcheting-up of pension age being reviewed in Whitehall. In light of what I surmise to be the Government’s success in reducing life expectancy during the pandemic, it is now proposing to delay raising the retirement age to 68, settling instead on 67 for the time being.

This cruel policy of forcing an increasing number of reluctant geriatrics into the workforce will inevitably fail to increase productivity, merely resulting in the theft of the pensions and retirement we have paid for. What we should instead be doing is demanding an urgent restoration of the pre-1995 retirement ages of 60 and 65, alongside the abolition of arbitrary UN replacement migration policies.

Causes of the pension crisis

This elaborate replacement migration policy blames the general public for the pension crisis that was, in fact, caused by a never-ending cycle of increasingly elaborate and exuberant government interventions in the market. All of this was facilitated by having an independent central bank that can print money without the consent of Parliament without limit, following the collapse of the discipline previously imposed by the gold standard.

We can trace this ill back to the founding of the Bank of England, but the most recent pensions crisis can be explained by the quantitative easing that followed the 2008 crash. In order to maintain asset values and keep borrowing costs low (including for governments themselves), governments instructed their central banks to conduct quantitative easing, to make unprecedented purchases of assets including government debt.

Pension funds tend to rely on government bonds. Government-issued debt instruments (known as gilts in the UK) are desirable because they are a safe form of long-term investment, since the governments of developed countries rarely default on their debt. They also—until 2008—provided pension funds with a steady flow of income to pay pensioners, owing to their interest-bearing nature, much like a savings account in a bank. 

Continues……