Cancel Employer Pension?

bendix

Oh lordy, the days of the Morning Star having any credibility are long gone, I'm afraid, but at least it provides us with an interesting insight into your terms of reference.

So I take it you would prefer to nationalise such services. How would you pay for that, without using public and taxpayer's money? Where would this money come from, given the high level of public debt we currently have?

dunstonh

I think its clear that Bernard wants the UK to cease being a capitalist based democracy and move to communism.

bendix

True dunstonh. And it's a wellknown fact that those workers' paradises were - ummmmmm - utterly devastating to the life of the average . . umm .. worker.

But, hey, why let facts get in the way of a good ideology.

I, like many of us, used to be a left-wing idealist. Then I got a job and started paying taxes. I suppose I just grew up.

BernardM

The Morning Star issued a small supplement, it contained a contribution from Tony Benn on media diversity and the importance of distribution in a truly free press.

The Oxygen of Democracy

Information is the oxygen of democracy, for, if the people do not know what is going on, they cannot use their judgement when it comes to making the political choices that the ballot box allows them to make.

Britain is one of the most secretive countries in the world and, not only does the government keep secret much of what it is doing and thinking about, but, by the elaborate use of news management and the co-option of journalists, it manages to get its case across in the most favourable light, often with a complete disregard for the truth.

It is for this reason that a press has so often been regarded as essential for the maintenance of a free society and why countries that censor the press are so regularly criticised – as if we in Britain would never contemplate such a thing.

But the fact is that the means by which information and opinion are withheld from the public are much more complicated and sophisticated than people realise.

For a start, most of the press is owned by private proprietors who not only have an economic interest in maintaining the status quo, they also have an equally important interest in demonising all those who take a contrary view and, whatever the personal views of the journalists that they employ, these people are so terrorised at the prospect of losing their jobs or facing a cancellation of their short term contracts that, in no time at all, they find themselves conforming with what their proprietor wants.

The BBC is a public-service broadcasting organisation, but anyone who has ever studied its history knows that it is totally and completely committed to the interests of the Establishment and, while it is prepared to criticise elements within the Establishment, it too will suppress news or activities that might encourage a serious alternative from being developed.

So tight is the control of the media that most readers and listeners and viewers tend to take for granted the views that they receive and never get to hear of any other views… a situation that is exactly what is intended.

The language that the media uses is also very important.

Opinions on the left are often categorised as ‘hard’ and those who express them are not responsible for speeches but for ‘outbursts’ and, in many other ways, the minds of the public are moulded the way that the people at the top want.

And then, a generation later, these conventional views are frozen into a permanent record by historians – usually Establishment figures – and, once they have written an authoritative account of what has happened, that is supposed to end all argument.

There are a mass of periodicals and papers which do get prepared and published and which do give a wholly different view of what is happening. Of these, the Morning Star is the most important because it is a national daily paper, published by a co-operative and representing the labour and socialist interests in Britain.

There are many other socialist papers available on a weekly or monthly basis, representing different strands of socialist opinion – all of them well thought out, well written and attractively laid out, but these too find it very hard to get an outlet.

Many trade unions publish excellent magazines, as do local groups and special interest groups dealing, perhaps, with animal welfare or environmental issues, not to forget those representing women’s interests or the interests of the ethnic communities who suffer equally from this censorship.


The right to free speech is meaningless without the right to be heard.! We can boast that any journalist can write what he or she wishes, but if nobody gets an opportunity to see it in the shops or buy it, then that right too becomes something of a fraud.

As a result of all this, on some of the important occasions in recent years, people have been absolutely and totally misled about what was going on! and, as a result, have been accessories after policies which have done immense damage to the nation, it’s economy and its social cohesion.

For example, the cold war was sold to us all on the basis that the Red Army was just waiting to land in Britain and take us over and that only the Polaris and the Trident held it back – all of which was a total and complete lie, since the real object was to be able to identify critics of the status quo as secret agents of the KGB who were not really concerned with unemployment or housing, but were aiming to undermine society.

Similarly, at the time of the Falklands War, none of these brave and fearless journalists pointed out that there was more oil around the Falkland Islands than around Britain itself and that this was really an oil war – as was the Gulf war which followed nine years later.

The horrors of the Gulf war, including the use of depleted uranium ammunition by the coalition forces, the decision to bury alive retreating Iraqi conscripts as they lay in their trenches and the killing of nearly half a million Iraqi children because of the sanctions that have been applied so rigourously, hardly rated a mention because they ran against convenient wisdom.

It is true that some journalists make it their business to do a huge insight article or prepare an expose of a TV programme – five years after the event, when it is too late to help, but when they suddenly reveal what the press said at the time and which they knew about and ignored.

And then these brave journalists and TV producers get an award at Cannes for their brilliance in the revelations that they have so cleverly uncovered.

It is always hard for a nation to be told uncomfortable facts and unpopular views which are so bitterly attacked but which very often turn out to have been absolutely and completely true and, with the passage of time, may become the conventional wisdom of the day.

So it was with Samuel Plimsoll, who was denounced as a terrorist in the Shipping Gazette for calling for an end to the old coffin ships which took so many seamen to their death, but was later seen as a hero with his Plimsoll Line.

The suffragettes were denounced as troublemakers, as were Gandhi and Nehru and Nelson Mandela.

Yet now we know that they were right all along and those thundering leading articles and pompous news bulletins which warned us at the time were just absolutely and completely wrong.

But, if we are to avoid this, we must have access to alternative views when they are relevant so that we can hear them at the moment when they might have some influence.

This requires not only balance in the newspapers and the broadcasting channels but also a proper distribution system to allow these dissident periodicals and newspapers to be there for us to see in the shops so that we can pick them up and buy them.

If these alternative voices are to be made available, then we should be able to hear them reported in the regular media and be sure that they can be read by those who want to think things out for themselves.

The bias in distribution and retailing represents a major problem, but it would not be unreasonable to argue that those who run the companies that undertake these services should be required to carry and display a wider range of material than they do now.

How it should be done is a more practical question, but there can be no doubt that it is an objective that we should set ourselves and then see how it can best be achieved.

bendix

Well, thanks for those stunning insights Bernard. Stunning, but highly unoriginal as they were much more articulately presented by Ralph Miliband in The State in Capitalist Society nearly forty years ago and, indeed, by Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man.

Anyhoooooo .. . . . . . . back to the debate.

Pensions . .. anyone?

BernardM

We have a national insurance surplus of £47 billion. Don't tell me it doesn't exist because it does. We could solve the pensions crisis tomorrow with the right political will.

bendix

Ummmm . does it exist Bernard? Does it? Well, I'll take your word for it, because frankly your one-dimensional ranting is starting to bore the pants off me now.

Anyway, sod state pensions. Who needs 'em.

Save for your pensions yourself, people. Power to the people!

BernardM

bendix wrote: »

Our pensioners, including you I suspect, should do what every one else has to do and make their own provision. The fact that they don't do it is noone's fault except their own.

The state already provides a safety net pension. If they want more, they need to pay for it themselves.

There is no 'natural right' for people to be taken care of by others. Get real.

It's been said before, and we must say it again. The government can afford an adequate and responsive state pension scheme. It owes it to the elderly to provide it and to the low paid to ensure that they don't end up funding it out of already inadequate wages.

jamesd

The government can't afford anything, it has no money. If you want to say raise taxes to pay for higher pensions, at least say it clearly instead of pretending that it's coming from the wave of a magic wand.

We don't owe anything to anyone, except the average pension level during their working life, which is well below current pension levels. That is, the same pension for pensioners that they provided for the generation that their NI and taxes were providing for.

Do you think that someone should get a pension above the wages they made while working?

Minimum wage is currently £11,918.40 less tax and NI for 40 hour weeks paid 52 weeks a year. Tax on that is £1,089.92 and NI £681.72 leaving after tax annual income of £10,146.76. For a pensioner there would be no NI and £9,490 of the £10,146.76 would be free of tax for someone above state pension age. That means a pension of £10,310.95 before tax would be the same as a person working full time for minimum wage gets, without any need to do any work at all.

Go any higher than that and you're proposing higher individual income than many workers get during their working life.

Go more than two or three thousand higher and you're above the amount I spend, which includes rent, rates and the rest.

Lets say an 18 year old wanted to get a pension equal to current minimum wage. Basic State Pension and S2P/SERPs would pay about £7,000 so that leaves a need for an extra pension of 10,310.95 - 7,000 = 3,310.95. Lets say the worker pays in 4% of pay (39.73 a month) and the employer pays in 3% (29.80) and tax relief is 1% more (9.93). For an 18 year old male that is likely to produce a personal pension of £4,230 a year, above the target. If they just wanted to match minimum wage they would need to put in just 2.6% of their wage, £28.82 a month or £6.65 a week.

How much worry should we have about someone who's not even willing to put aside 2.6% of their pay for their old age?

I used 4%, 3% and 1% because those are the values for the National Pension Savings Scheme that will be introduced in a few years. As you can see, it's expected to take a person on minimum wage for their working life to the point where they retire on more than they were paid during that working life.

Maybe you should propose increasing minimum wage by 17p an hour with the extra a mandatory pension contribution not paid to the worker but put in a pension pot for them? That's what 2.6% of pay comes to.

bendix

There's no point explaining stuff with Bernard, mate. He doesnt engage in debate. Instead, he ignores rational argument and trots out the drivel that the Morning Star spoon-fed him that morning.