The Independent, no friend of public sector pensions, headlines with more inflated news about public sector pay as you go pensions. Pensions that will be paid to hospital porters, doctors, nurses and teachers. Public sector pension costs may reach £79bn a year (by 2060)http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/public-sector-pension-costs-may-reach-16379bn-a-year-1920091.html
The only reason that public sector pensions are headline news is due to the vast amounts of borrowing the government has undertaken to bail out the banks. On top of which the actions of the bankers has led to the deepest global recession since the 1930's. So who is at fault here? The public servants who save for their pension or the bankers who have bought the economy to its knees and had to be bailed out with our money?
Meanwhile the silence on the banker's bailout continues to be deafening with no explanation as to why the bankers have been bailed out to the tune of £1trillion so far. As highlighted in the Guardian a by Simon Jenkins http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/11/banks-lied-darling-puppet-city - a trillion pounds has been devoted over the past 18 months to protect Britain's financial system from alleged Armageddon, with not a murmur of value for money.
This stupefying sum is more than has ever been spent on any project by any government in British history. We know where the money came from but we do not know if it was necessary, nor who now has it. We know only that, a year on, Britain is experiencing a worse recession than any comparable country. The lack of accountability, the sheer lack of curiosity from the political community, is amazing.
Quite – the rush to condemn public servants to pensioner poverty, while bankers continue to pay themselves billions in bonuses, is part of one of the greatest con tricks in human history. We have paid, and will go on paying, a horrific price for this. Our economy is being forced to lose jobs, firms, infrastructure, prosperity and possibly our future retirement income. It must be resisted.
