Pensions Shmensions

I have been reading a lot recently about the Pensions crisis that we are facing in the UK. The oldies here in the office are whingeing about it because they feel they might have to spend a few more years pushing staplers round their desks and contributing to the tea and biscuits kitty. A lot of people much cleverer than me have written about the problem, so I don’t intend to go over the infinite detail here. Instead, I’ll summarise the issue in true “Pensions Crisis for Dummies” style.

1. People are living longer, unfortunately. This is especially true of ageing famous people such as Baroness Thatcher, Mohammed Al Fayed and James Blunt (he’s had his time and you know it).
2. These ageing people want the state pension, plus any private ones they’ve contributed to, to keep paying them whilst they drift away into a dribbling mess of senility.
3. Public sector workers have traditionally had a very generous pension scheme (via rule 85), and the Government wants to change that, due to points 1 & 2 above, so that the country doesn’t go bust in a few years time. Obviously the public sector workers don’t want that. The selfish bastards.
4. The current forecasted deficit is said to be something like £27bn. To put this into perspective, if you stacked 27 billion pound coins on top of each other it would go really really fucking high.
5. The solution is either a) put more money in now or b) take the money out later. Simple. Or so you’d think.

We’ve already had one round of strikes, and it appears there’ll be another later this month. What they hope to achieve I don’t know, as the facts are the facts. If there isn’t enough money, then there isn’t enough. It’s not like votes in a US Presidential election where you can just magic some extra ones from your Floridian back pocket. The pot will be empty. End of.

Anyway, I have come to a point where I believe I have a solution. It’s not very often I feel I can offer a perfect route through a political minefield, but this time I think I’ve cracked it. We can afford to give the public sector workers exactly what they want, and Rule 85 can stay in the form of generous pensions and allowing them to retire at 60. All this whilst not having to pay any more into their pensions today.

The answer is simple. They must all promise to die by their 70th birthday. Or sooner if they’ve written an album called Back to Bedlam.

This Politics malarkey is a fucking doddle isn’t it?