EX-CBI boss, Lord Turner’s plans for pensions are just the means chosen by the Blair government to make the working class pay for the crisis of the capitalist system. This has seen stock market crashes wipe out the final salary pensions schemes of millions, and rising inflation threaten the miniscule state pensions of the majority of workers.
Raising the retirement age for men and women to 66 by 2030, 67 by 2040 and 68 by 2050 will see millions more hard working men and women paying for state pensions that they will never live to receive. In cities like Glasgow the average age of death for a working class male is 67, so the reality is that putting up the age of retirement will put billions into the pockets of the capitalist state, and no doubt from there into the pockets of big business via tax cuts.
As well, all of the propaganda that people are living many years longer than they used to, has got to be weighed in the balance alongside the firmly held medical view that younger people are eating such unhealthy, but cheap factory produced foods, filled with sugar and salt, because this is all that they can afford, and that the end result will be that large numbers of them will die before their parents!
Judging that the state pension will remain very meagre indeed, even by the standard of the other advanced EU states, Lord Turner has brought forward the spectre of the National Pension Savings Scheme (NPSS) for workers, to be established by 2010. Employers will be ‘compelled’ to contribute to their workers’ NPSS, with employees contributing four per cent of their salary, employers three per cent and the government one per cent.
The only problem with this is that final salary pensions have been collapsed by the bosses, after a series of stock market crashes that the bosses say ruined them.
The NPSS is just an Arthur Daly type con trick. Stock market crashes have destroyed final salary pensions, and now Turner says what you need is more of the same.
Even Lord Turner seems to recognise this with his proposal that workers will be free to choose from a range of funds just where their NPSS is invested – so that after the next capitalist shares collapse, the bosses will be able to say, ‘well you chose just where your pension would be invested, so it’s all down to you and your poor judgement’.
However, such is the desperate crisis of British capitalism that not even the leaders of the Labour government, Blair and Brown, can agree on the Turner pensions plan. Chancellor Brown, who has the figures that reveal the real state of British capitalism in his desk, wants means-testing to be extended to all pensions, and is opposed to pension rises being tied to increases in average earnings.
He says that to do away with means-testing and to index link the state pension to average earnings will be ruinous, court disaster and force major increases in taxation. Blair disagrees. However, both are agreed that all of the public sector final salary pension schemes must be ended to pave the way for the new inferior pensions and for retirement at 68.
Workers must reject Lord Turner’s plan for pensions. They must insist that the trade union leaders defend retirement at 65, and 60 where workers have negotiated final salary pension schemes.
In fact, the local government workers’ strikes against pension cuts and retirement at 65 must be built up into a general strike. The only solution to the crisis over pensions is to bring the Blair/Brown government down, to bring in a workers’ government that will carry out socialist policies.
It will guarantee all final salary pension schemes, vetoing any increase in the retirement age, and cutting it to 60, while bringing in a major increase in the state pension, and linking all future rises to increases in average earnings. To get the resources for these advances a workers government will nationalise the banks which are awash with tens of billions of profits.
