WE ARE ALL GETTING older and hoping to spend an ever increasingly long retirement on a comfortable pension. There was a time, not so very long age, when company pension schemes in the private sector fulfilled this hope and allowed many employees to enjoy an early retirement.
But today such private pension schemes have had to be abandoned by many employers. If their employees wish to have an addition to their basic state pension, they have to make their own arrangements without any employer contribution.
However the public sector worker continues to enjoy a healthy retirement because of their employer’s (the taxpayers) contributions have remained intact, and have been generous. Now the government wishes to address this imbalance between the public and private sector. Because we are all living much longer and an increase in the retirement age is needed as well as an increase in employee contribution; in order to afford public sector pensions.
This, you will not be to surprised to know, has angered the public sector unions; who are now in the process of balloting their members for strike action at the end of this month. In an attempt to avoid this the government has made concessions which they hope will appeal to the public sector workers over the heads of their unions. Chief secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander has said
‘This week and over the next couple of weeks, we will be communicating with 2.5 million public servants across this country to explain to them what is the government is offering
‘In those people’s hands is the decision about whether or not to go on strike. In those people’s hands is the influence of the unions’
The Labour shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, agreed with his colleagues’ views on the Andrew Marr programme. There is no sane and sensible reason why there needs to be a strike over this issue of public sector pensions after (or for that matter before) the government’s compromise. This issue needs to be tackled once and for all. The previous Labour government should have tackled this question full on during its 13 year tenure in government. But as they are financed by the unions, they have foreclosed on any effective action that would upset their paymasters, whose member’s contributions provided nearly 90% of the Labour Party’s finances.
THE PUBLIC SECTOR unions have been itching for a fight with this government from the day it was elected to office; and nothing will deter them in their ambition. Even if this government met every dot and comma of their demands, the unions would conjure up some excuse to continue with their action.
The unions are governed not by their member’s interests – if so they would accept the compromise offer by Danny Alexander. They cannot hope for a better deal and, I suspect, their members know this and see no reason why they should be left destitute at Christmas, because of their leader’s prejudices.
The government has made a compromise that is perceived from all quarters, including the Labour Party as a, if not generous, then fair compromise considering the pressure on the public finances. But the unions are baying once more for Tory blood, and they will once more use their members as a means to an end; as they did in the 1970s.
The public sector union bosses are recalcitrant Marxists who nevertheless live like the wealthy they loathe because of their salaries and pension provisions: all of which would compare well with many of the company directors they profess to despise.
It should be a cause for celebration that we are living and are able to work longer than our parents did before us. Modern diet and medical science has increased our life expectancy. The retirement age was set 65 when the welfare state became operable after the Second World War. Since then modern scientific medicine and a healthy diet has helped us live longer. It has nothing to do with Tory prejudices, as the unions would like their members to believe, but to do with advances in our survival rates, and the ability of the tax payer to carry on subsidising pensions that they, working in the private sector, can only dream of.
The union bosses and their activists have been looking forward to the forthcoming series of strikes as much as they have Christmas itself, and are determined to enjoy them however generous the government becomes.
The government compromise has effectively put the ball back in the union’s court as far as any wish for public sympathy is concerned – although I doubt that, with this lot in charge of the unions, public sympathy matters little. But the union’s membership does care how their action is perceived and may begin to think the government’s compromise, the best outcome available to them.
AS FAR AS THE union’s various leaders are concerned, the forthcoming strikes are political in all but name, and their members are a means to a very nasty political end – getting rid of an elected government. It is a tried and tested tactic that emerged in the late 1960s and evolved throughout the 1970s, usually against a Tory government, but not exclusively. For both Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, were perceived by the more Left-wing unions as being on the Right of the Labour Party and therefore class traitors; which made them legitimate targets.
It was not until the 1980s that the unions were neutralised by reforms to the law made by Margaret Thatcher; reforms of the kind that outlawed secondary picketing and sympathy strikes. After her reforms, the unions, for fear of the enormous financial penalties they faced, began to see sense The unions were taught a bitter lesson, but one which had to be given for the country’s sake.
We cannot go back to those days. They almost brought the country to its knees: we were called the sick man of Europe. Bodies went unburied and our streets became infested by weeks of uncollected refuse. We worked a four day week and suffered power cuts on a daily basis. The term, third world country, was proving a popular description for what was occurring.
The public sector workers have to adjust themselves to a new reality and learn to live with it. If you were to win and have every one of your demands acceded to by the government, then it would be some other part of the public sector that would have to bear the cost. Those who work in the public sector are financed through general taxation; it is as simple as that, and what may turn out to be a victory for them, will come at a cost to those working in private sector, who have long since seen their company pension schemes abandoned.
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