It appears the Treasury has received yet another warning about a retirement crisis, as if the last three decades of economic mismanagement were not warning enough. A new report reveals that three-quarters of British workers are not on track for a moderate pension income. That is not a statistic.
That is a class action waiting to happen. I find myself reaching for the historical parallels with the weary resignation of a man who has seen this film before. We are witnessing the slow motion collapse of the post-war social contract, replaced by a system that increasingly resembles the Victorian era of private charity and workhouses.
The intellectual decadence of our policymakers is breathtaking. They prattle on about ‘nudge theory’ and ‘auto-enrolment’ as if these palliatives can fix a structural rot. Let me be blunt: the defined benefit pension, that glorious relic of the Industrial Age’s golden era, is dead.
What remains is a patchwork of inadequate savings, property speculation, and the desperate hope that the state will step in. But the state is broke, and the demographic cliff is approaching. The national identity of Britain was once built on the idea of a fair retirement, a reward for a life of labour.
That identity is now a fairy tale. I am reminded of the Roman ‘annona’, the grain dole that kept the mob quiet. Our equivalent is the triple lock, a political bribe that merely postpones the reckoning.
The Treasury warns of a crisis, but they have been warned for years. The real crisis is one of imagination. Until we accept that the era of cheap retirement is over, and that we must either work longer, save far more, or accept a lower standard of living, we are merely playing with statistics.
The ghost of the Victorian pauper is already at the table. Let us not pretend otherwise.
