Today is pension day.
It is also the day when we top up the Gin stocks and replenish the wine cellar.
We sometimes fill the car with diesel but that costs more than, and doesn't taste as good as, Gin.
Then we return to the bunker, raise the drawbridge and hunker down for another month.
If you don't go out, don't drive anywhere and keep taking the tablets then survival is guaranteed.
But is survival enough?
Today teachers and immigration officers and driving examiners and other civil servants are striking because they want to do more than survive when they are old and they see the current pension proposals as reducing their living standards in retirement and costing them more whilst they are working.
Work longer, pay more and get less, I didn't see that in either the con or the dem manifesto.
There are two types of pensions mainly. One you pay in over the years, build up a 'Pot' that then generates an income which, after expenses and charges is your pension. Usually based on actuarial calculations, usually fairly conservatively forecasted and usually guaranteed. Sometimes the 'Pot' returns to sender when you die and the income is called an annuity.
That type of pension is OK.
But the State Pension and the Non Contributory Occupational Pension is not OK because we're all living longer, and the funding basis of those types of pensions is different.
When I attended a course, aged 17 as a newly qualified Civil Servant I was introduced to the work of William Beveridge who essentially invented the Welfare State.
Returning to my office, full of enthusiasm for the essential qualities of justice, fairness and security introduced by Beveridge and enacted by the Labour Government of 1945, I was met with a cynical response from older colleagues who pointed out that a scheme paid for out of current income was OK as long the current income kept on coming in.
Of course they were right.
Fifty years of de-industrialisation, the loss of so many working class jobs, the increase in unemployment, the people making serious money who seriously look for off shore schemes to avoid paying taxes and we are left where we are in an economy where fewer people are left to pay into the scheme that actually pays my pension.
My contribution over those fifty years paid the pensions of the then current retirees, now I am hoping that today's tax payers will pay mine. And I am going to live longer and that will mean that I will be relying not only on my children's but possibly my grandchildren's taxes too.
Now the College of Physicians say I shouldn't be drinking Gin.
Life, as the T Shirt says, is hard and then you die.
It is also the day when we top up the Gin stocks and replenish the wine cellar.
We sometimes fill the car with diesel but that costs more than, and doesn't taste as good as, Gin.
Then we return to the bunker, raise the drawbridge and hunker down for another month.
If you don't go out, don't drive anywhere and keep taking the tablets then survival is guaranteed.
But is survival enough?
Today teachers and immigration officers and driving examiners and other civil servants are striking because they want to do more than survive when they are old and they see the current pension proposals as reducing their living standards in retirement and costing them more whilst they are working.
Work longer, pay more and get less, I didn't see that in either the con or the dem manifesto.
There are two types of pensions mainly. One you pay in over the years, build up a 'Pot' that then generates an income which, after expenses and charges is your pension. Usually based on actuarial calculations, usually fairly conservatively forecasted and usually guaranteed. Sometimes the 'Pot' returns to sender when you die and the income is called an annuity.
That type of pension is OK.
But the State Pension and the Non Contributory Occupational Pension is not OK because we're all living longer, and the funding basis of those types of pensions is different.
When I attended a course, aged 17 as a newly qualified Civil Servant I was introduced to the work of William Beveridge who essentially invented the Welfare State.
Returning to my office, full of enthusiasm for the essential qualities of justice, fairness and security introduced by Beveridge and enacted by the Labour Government of 1945, I was met with a cynical response from older colleagues who pointed out that a scheme paid for out of current income was OK as long the current income kept on coming in.
Of course they were right.
Fifty years of de-industrialisation, the loss of so many working class jobs, the increase in unemployment, the people making serious money who seriously look for off shore schemes to avoid paying taxes and we are left where we are in an economy where fewer people are left to pay into the scheme that actually pays my pension.
My contribution over those fifty years paid the pensions of the then current retirees, now I am hoping that today's tax payers will pay mine. And I am going to live longer and that will mean that I will be relying not only on my children's but possibly my grandchildren's taxes too.
Now the College of Physicians say I shouldn't be drinking Gin.
Life, as the T Shirt says, is hard and then you die.
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