Sometimes you find something out, and it just makes you nauseous. Well, I was trying not to puke the other day when I read a story in the Guardian detailing how the highest earners benefit from a wildly disproportionate share of the nation’s pension tax relief.
According to figures revealed by the TUC, the top 1% of earners accounted for pension tax breaks of £10bn, out of a total £37bn set aside by the Treasury.
Now, it’s true that equality and fairness are out of vogue in British politics, and although we’re ruled by a party nominally for ‘Labour’, they have shown that they are still intensely relaxed about people becoming very rich, despite the financial crisis.
But this is redistribution of wealth of a particularly disgusting kind. It’s social justice turned backwards, government sactioned social injustice. That top 1% accounts for those earning £150,000 or above. Do people earning that much money really need to be subsidised by the rest of us? Of course not.
Most people my generation probably won’t even have a chance at retirement. With the increasing debt burden being accrued by today’s government, and the already spiralling costs of looking after an aging baby boom generation, we’ll be working until they drag us us off, soiled and drooling, to the hospice (- some time around 2086, allowing for improvements in medical technology).
And even many older workers who already have pensions are technically fucked. Company final salary pensions are a thing of the past, pension funds systematically gutted by corporate bastards trying to make a quick buck. Those private schemes still standing are in a precarious position. The state provision is minimal, barely above subsistence. Even now I’m starting to see more old people at work as I’m out and about.
In general, everyone here at ground level is too busy worrying about debts to think about saving for the future.
Up in the penthouses things are a lot rosier. Not only are they enjoying all this tax relief, but they’re making the most of it: today it comes out that directors at leading companies have seen their pension provisions rise 23% in the past year alone, according to information also helpfully provided by the TUC. Out of 373 directors surveyed, the average pot was worth nearly £250,000 a year; average total, £3.4m.
The state pension is £95.25 per week for a single person; that’s £4,953 a year.
Damn, I better write a book or something.
