A Decent Pension

For some time it has been suggested that the State Pension paid in the UK has been in decline but no figures have been produced - until now. In January of this year a book was published by the Actuarial Profession. Entitled "100 Years of State Pension" it tells us that the State Pension introduced on January 1st 1909 was set at 10/- [50p] per week, equivalent to 25% of the national average wage at that time. Now one hundred years later it is 17% of national average wage. Surely this must be a great triumph of social policy and government management for the whole of a century. Admittedly, the pension is now paid when we reach the age of 65 instead of 70 but it is a crashing indictment of every government since WWII that we have gone backwards. Especially, it is an indictment of the last 11 years of a Labour government. Mrs Thatcher started the rot by linking the pension to the RPI instead of average wages a sleight of hand that guaranteed that the value of pensions as a percentage of average wage would for ever go downwards. We would expect that of the Tories and particularly Tories lead by the old bat Margaret Thatcher. But Labour has had time to change things and has chosen to do nothing. In fact the record of this Labour government on all matters of pensions has been abysmal. Gordon Brown has robbed private pension funds of £5 billion per year since he became chancellor in 1997; he has made no efforts to improve the State Pension beyond offering more means tested benefits - confident in the knowledge that applying is so complicated that at least half of those entitled will not get anything. Every year there is a feeling that he dislikes having to increase the pension at all. It has been calculated that if all the means testing were abandoned and the money spent directly on pensions the basic pension could immediately increase by £20 per week. Are government ministers concerned at all? Of course not, because all of them will get state guaranteed pensions, inflation proof and at levels that the rest of us can only dream about. Are they concerned that our State Pension is much the worst of any large country in the EU. The EU average is about 50% of average wage in each country.

There are frequent suggestions that we cannot afford to pay a decent State Pension. People are living longer and there will be fewer young people to keep the system afloat. How can anyone suggest this when we have financed a massive increase in payments to long-term unemployed since 2000; when all governments have consistently refused to address the massive cost of the pension scheme for public sector workers - a cost that is already heading for the stratosphere and made worse by the annual increase of 70,000 in the numbers employed in quangoes, in diversity co-ordination departments and in general paper shifting? I think we can assume that No.1 priority is to make sure that their pensions are OK and later look to see if there is anything they can consider doing for the rest of us. Surely not a high priority.

Lloyd George, thou shouldst be living at this hour.