[Osem]

lol It's not a straw man at all. Just an observation which applies to some and not others. Many of the people who're investing their £20k's will have gone without all sorts of things plenty of us younger folks have and still do take for granted. If they'd lived the way many do today and spent every penny they earned they would have been more reliant on the state throughout their working lives and more so their retirements. Having downsized from a 3 bed semi to a shoebox a few years ago my parents have some savings which they use to supplement the miniscule state pension they're entitled to. My mum went to a grammar school but my father didn't even get an education having been forced to leave at the age of 12-13 and like many of their generation, to get the 3 bed house they wound up owning many years later they did things like scrimp and save for years - no new cars, foreign holidays, no meals out, no smoking, no drinking, second hand clothes and cheap food. By doing this they managed to provide for themselves and qualified for nothing other than child benefit. My dad was self employed so there was no such thing as unemployment benefit for him. Thanks to the artificially low interest rates, their income has dropped significantly and their capital been eroded partly in order to bail out those who borrowed, remortgaged and borrowed some more to fund their relatively lavish lifestyles. If they are now getting some help by way of slightly higher interest rates so be it. There are plenty of things which in my opinion are far more unfair but they're probably best left to other threads.