Like the National Health Service, state pensions are one of the cornerstones of the Welfare State.
New Labour is now trying to privatise pensions, to shift the burden from the present collective system to one that will depend on ability to pay.
The effects will hit low paid workers and the poor hardest.
The policy aims to prevent taxes from rising and to allow savings from pensions to flow into the money markets to boost share values, commissions and fees.
The fact that the private pensions "industry" unleashed by the Tories in the 1980's has been so corrupt that most people no longer trust it, is a huge obstacle to current plans.
Hence the almost complete failure of "opting out" and the more recent "stakeholder" pensions.
Alongside this, the cannibalisation of company pensions schemes by business means that even the schemes that avoid bankruptcy will have problems paying pensions to workers who have made life-long contributions.
New Labour's special contribution is to attack the public sector. They have recently proposed replacing the "final salary" scheme with a "lifetime average". The idea came from Ruth Kelly, the Blairite religious fanatic then at the Cabinet Office, now Education Secretary see facing page).
Her claim that a pension based on the average of lifetime earnings rather than on the final three years, will help lower paid civil servants (or those such as women who took time off to have children) is simply Blair-speak for cutbacks.
Another proposal is to make all public sector workers, including teachers, work until they are 65 or take a cut in pension.
This has provoked whreats of strong from www.uul.org.uk
FOR I FOR
UNISON, the NUT, the PCS
and other unions, with a plan
for a day of action and a mass
lobby of parliament in the
spring.
INDON T
OCIA JUSTICE
WON N ERAL