Bluebird 1927

John, you've just identified the elephant in the room. MPs and senior civil servants receive defined benefit pensions, which means they are guaranteed a specific income in retirement regardless of investment performance or economic conditions. Those pensions are inflation linked, which means they rise automatically every year to keep pace with the cost of living. The employer contributions, which come from the taxpayer, run at roughly five times the rate of a typical private sector scheme. And none of this is ever mentioned when politicians talk about pension reform. Think about what that means in practice. The people deciding whether to means test your state pension, scrap the triple lock or redefine what you are entitled to are the same people whose own retirement income is gold plated, taxpayer funded and completely insulated from the reforms they are proposing for everyone else. They are not in the same system. They never have been. You're absolutely right that if the demographic argument applies to the basic state pension it applies equally to every taxpayer funded pension scheme. The numbers do not become more sustainable because the recipient works in Westminster rather than a factory in Rotherham. Any serious reform conversation that starts with the basic state pension and leaves public sector defined benefit schemes untouched is not a fiscal necessity. It is a political choice about whose retirement is worth protecting. And as you say, it starts to look very much like a targeted raid on the people least able to fight back.

Seems remarkable but it's true: in terms of P90/P10 ratio, wage compression in the UK is similar to the USSR at its most compressed. Soviet min wage also peaked at ~60% median income, while we've just hit 66%. Social democracy has achieved greater egalitarianism than communism.