Macavity Brown’s part in a fearful mess

It is interesting that Mr Brown is reported as having “leaked” statistics from the Department for Work and Pensions. Some might see this as a bit of luck; to me the word “collaboration” comes to mind.

I trust that the appropriate authorities are investigating the security aspects of this.

Mr Brown tells us that the Scottish pension system will be under strain after independence because we will have a higher pensioner-to-worker ratio. Perhaps this is true, but Scots don’t live so long and if we have this bulge it will, so to speak, die off quicker. The whole of Europe has an ageing population – Mr Brown is trying to scare us with something akin to a penny on a pint of milk.

He claims we (Scots) have paid into the UK pension system and will be better off remaining part of the UK. How unfortunate for him that, as he raises this subject, the media is revealing that the whole pension system is in a mess and that many pensioners of the near future will have a grim struggle.

Why this mess? Because under the last Labour government pension funds were looted. This led to the killing-off of final-salary pensions and their replacement by various average-salary schemes. UK pensions are not safer, thanks to Mr Brown.

Independence negotiations must include some “return” of funds paid in for pensions. I belong to the group that gets both an old age and army pension and Mr Brown is apparently trying to scare me.

I’m not that easily scared by a bad chancellor and failed Labour prime minister who has the nickname of Macavity because he is so rarely seen when blame is being apportioned and who has resurfaced in the service of the Tories.

Thomas R Burgess

Catherine’s Square

Perth

HOW galling on the day an insurance company (LV) reports that millions of pensioners will be facing hardship in retirement, I read of Gordon Brown’s concern for pensions. This coming from the former chancellor who single-handedly did more to wreck the UK pensions industry than anyone else in history. His “stealth tax” of abolishing tax credits on share dividends at the time was reckoned to cost Britain in excess of £100 billion and resulted in the demise of final-salary schemes.

I always wondered if politicians, particularly former chancellors, had brass necks, now I know they have.

Brian Petrie

Vivian Terrace

Edinburgh

WHO do the Scottish, indeed the British, public believe on the vexed question of independence and pensions?

It was interesting to read the LV report that average annual income in the United Kingdom drops by two-thirds on retirement (your report, 22 April). It comes as former prime minister Gordon Brown warns that Scottish pensioners in the future will need the security of shared risk and resources across the UK.

Regular doffing of their caps to the founding principles of the Welfare State has perhaps blinded Mr Brown and the Better Together campaign to some key points.

The extent of pensioner poverty – for whatever reason – is an appalling indictment of British postwar macroeconomic management. If LV is right and average annual pension income, including state pension, is £8,774 a year or £169 a week, that rates as very poor when compared to the rest of Europe. The LV figures on the position of retired women show them in an even worse plight.

Labour and Gordon Brown have to accept some of the responsibility for a situation that has grown up over nearly 70 years of central economic management by the Treasury.

Of course, the former chancellor is anxious to reassure a key element of Labour’s vote that their existing pension arrangements will be safe. But it sounds very much as if he is making a plea for a dependency culture – stay with the Union and Scotland will continue to get strong subsidies from Westminster.

The real issue he should be addressing is whether independence can help get the growth that will allow decent pensions, by European standards, to be paid in the future.

Bob Taylor

Shiel Court

Glenrothes, Fife

WE had a glimpse of what lies ahead after a separatist victory when a whistleblower leaked a Department for Work and Pensions memo written by Scottish Finance Secretary John Swinney.

In it, he questioned the affordability of state pensions in an independent Scotland and acknowledged the Treasury absorbs the cost of our rapidly ageing population.

The SNP denied there was a problem but set up a working party to try to balance the soaring costs of our elderly and our plunging oil revenue.

Rubbishing the experts is easy – what is not so easy is to see how we will pay for free care, free university tuition, free prescriptions and all Alex Salmond’s other freebies.

If Mark Carney, Gordon Brown and even John Swinney are “scaremongering” will the economic giants who will lead us to the Promised Land of Brigadoon please stand up?

(Dr) John Cameron

Howard Place

St Andrews, Fife