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National Insurance has been in effect all my working life. My first experience of its rank unfairness was when I was a student. I took what work there was delivering grocery orders in a van for my local co-op during the summer holidays. Sometimes I would get a full week's work, but mostly it was filling in weekend rounds.
Although I was offered a good rate of pay for a Saturday or a Sunday round, I ended up receiving hardly anything. This was because of the National Insurance rules. They required my employer to deduct from my pay a whole week's National Insurance contribution, even though I had only worked for one day that week. This amounted to about 70% of my gross pay.
Despite this absolutely criminal rip-off, I had no insurance cover whatever. This was because I had not paid 'enough' contributions. I shall explain this in a minute. I gave up the work much to the disappointment of the co-op manager. The amount of money I actually received after a hard weekend round was simply not worth it.
After leaving college I went to work at the research establishment of a major utility. After I had been there for 6 months, I fell ill with glandular fever. Naturally, National Insurance had started to deduct contributions from the day I started my job. On applying for sickness benefit, National Insurance refused. They would pay me nothing. Their reason was that I "had not paid enough contributions". If my landlady had not put me up for that time free of charge and cared for me by changing my bed every hour, I would have been destitute as well as ill.
If I take out an insurance on my car or my house, pay my first premium and then have an accident or a fire a week later, then I am covered by the insurance. The insurance company does not write to me saying that my insurance is not yet in effect because I "have not paid enough contributions".
The National Insurance system is the reluctant condescension, by a capitalist state, to humour what it sees as the impudent demands of working people. It bears the spirit of its masters. It cares not for the individual. It cares only to fulfil, to the minimum degree, its obligations under the relevant Act of a capitalist puppet Parliament.
The attitude of the National Insurance system towards individual employees is that of the capitalist. This attitude was well illustrated to me two years later when I was working as a programmer for a manufacturer of flight simulators. My work and my home were located close to a major airport. The locality was low-lying and naturally prone to fog. Mixed with an unceasing supply of jet exhaust, it formed a sickly yellow green soup. It quickly exacerbated the slightest cough into lung-stabbing pneumonia.
My wife was ill in hospital. I was living alone in our cottage in the country. One dark night, after finishing a late 4pm to midnight shift, it got me. The yellow green slime invaded my lungs and I went down with what I understand from the symptoms must have been double pneumonia. I was too ill to get out of bed. Needles were piercing my throat. My lungs were being crushed between two beds of sharp nails. I was sweating. I could not bear to breathe the outside air in my bedroom. I had to keep my nose under the covers. We had no telephone. I had no means of telling the outside world. I just had to stay there until I gradually emerged from it two weeks later. I had eaten very little. I had lost sense of time. I could not eat much, but I ate enough to get my strength back. I switched on my radio and discovered how long I had been ill. I was desperate to get back to work and to visit my wife in hospital.
When I got back to work they told me I had been fired. They said that I had failed to turn up for work for two weeks and had also failed to give a reason for my absence during that time. I tried to explain to them, but my explanations were 'unacceptable'. Luckily, I passed the director of the project I was working on. He did not ask where I had been. He told me to get straight down to the shop floor and finish testing my software. The project was running late and was in imminent danger of dropping from planned 'profit' to 'cost-plus' status. I told him I had been sacked. He rushed to the personnel department. A few minutes later I had been reinstated.
I went to a doctor that evening. He examined me. He said there was nothing wrong with me. He said he could not issue a retrospective certificate. I had no doctor's certificate of illness. I could provide no `acceptable evidence' that I had been ill. So, though I had been reinstated, the company would not pay me any sick pay for the fortnight I had been ill. National Insurance would pay me nothing either. I had lost two weeks wages (at shift rates), and I still had the mortgage and everything else to pay. My wife's hospital was 80 miles away. I could not afford to visit her.
It should be noticed that the company's instant and exclusive response to my absence was that I had committed the misdemeanour of skiving - of being absent from work without permission. It was concerned with its potential loss of profit. It did not deem it necessary to substantiate this assumption by sending somebody round to see if I were all right. It was not concerned in the slightest with the well-being of the individual.
Likewise with National Insurance. The absence of two weeks' contributions did not trigger an enquiry as to my well-being. It merely reported at that end of the tax year that I was two contributions short for the year, and that if my 'cover' were to remain intact, I would have to pay them. It shows its capitalist spirit by using the omnipotent power of its mandate to take, take, take; while only giving anything back when, by all endeavour, it can find no bureaucratic instrument by which to wriggle out of having to do so.
I was ill for three months in 1985 with serious flu. I was too ill to travel to the doctor's surgery. Unlike in the past, doctors no longer make house calls for any but the very young and the very old. Being self-employed and working at home at the time, if I were well enough to go all the way to the doctor's surgery in the freezing cold, then I was certainly well enough to work. The upshot was, of course, that I did not get any national insurance sick pay then either.
National Insurance is not insurance. To call it insurance is a misrepresentation of what it is. If you are well enough to travel to, and queue for ages in, a doctor's surgery then it will provide sick pay when you don't really need it. If you are too desperately ill to go and see a doctor then it will pay you nothing. Even then, it does not necessarily provide immediate cover. Cover only kicks in after you have been paying premiums for many months. That is not what most people would understand by 'insurance'. It is also purported to be setting aside a large part of what you pay, for your retirement in the form of a state pension. But that is not where your money actually goes. It goes to pay the pensions of those who are retired while you are working. You are paying their pensions: not yours. The government has already spent the money they paid in during their working lives.
It is a con which only something as omnipotent as the state could get away with. On what moral grounds was I forced month after month to pay these so-called National Insurance contributions. I have only ever received sick pay from National Insurance on a couple of occasions when the doctor signed me off when I was perfectly able and willing to return to work. What is in it for me? What is in it for the individual?
The plain truth is that National Insurance is in reality simply another form of income tax. From any practical point of view it could be replaced by a simple increase in the rate of income tax. This way it would be simpler and cheaper to administrate. As it stands, though, it is of great political advantage to the state in that it hides just how much direct tax the generic individual is actually being made to pay.