The Great Pension Rip-Off.

In order to receive a state pension on which you can survive, the government tells us, you will need to work longer and pay more. The reason, they say, is because there are just too many old people in the country and they are living longer. It's all the fault of that pesky "baby boom" generation that came along after World War II. Of course 50 years ago we were told that was why we needed immigration into the country and it has continued at an ever-accelerating pace ever since. Yet, despite this, we seem to be in exactly the same position that we were before. The truth is that the wealthy simply don't want to pay taxes just to benefit the peasants. Having manufactured this "crisis" in state pensions they now tell us that we need private pensions that will augment and, eventually they hope, replace state provision completely. These pensions will be created, sold and managed by the banks - those paragons of probity and trustworthiness that we've all come to love so much. The money that we pay in will give them the wherewithal to continue to do what they love best - gambling with someone else's money and extracting lucrative "management fees" for doing as little as possible. In return for controlling your money for an entire lifetime they will then sell you an annuity with a pitiful rate of return that, they hope, will mean you will never live long enough to get your money back. Up until recently you at least had the choice to keep control of your own money if you chose and to make whatever investments you thought fit. The banks would always insist that "best advice" was to save into a pension, but that advice was never true. Now the government, having consulted closely with the banks, has taken that choice out of your hands. Now you have to give the banks your money whether you want to or not and then accept whatever terrible rate of return their annuities yield. This is nothing more than a pact between the greedy who don't want to pay taxes and the even greedier who want to perpetuate a failed financial system that works only to their benefit.

Francis Maude Feather's His Own Nest.

While the likes of William Hague, Simon Hunt and Eric Pickles have been telling everyone today that they will have to work harder and longer their mate Francis Maude has been busy making sure that MP's and Cabinet Minister's pensions are even more gold plated than they were before. The changes to their pensions that came into force yesterday meant that they would have to pay an extra 2.4% in contributions, but the rewards they get will soar. For an extra £229 per year while they are in cabinet (which in the case of this lot means 3 years) they will receive a whopping £314 per year for up to twenty years. In other words for an extra contibution of £687 they stand to get back as much as £6,280. By any standards a good deal. All in all that means that today’s cabinet ministers can look forward to a £731,000 retirement pot - worth a potential £43,000-plus a year - for five years "work"! Many people regard such things as proof of hypocrisy. In fact its much worse then that - it is proof of sheer criminality.