Here come da truth...
Yesterday the Treasury keeled over, foamed at the mouth and went into full-tilt Vicky Pollard Defcom 4 rhetoric over this Gobshite Brown pensions business.
Their but yeah, but no, but yeah re-buffs went something like this ;
1) The CBI were lobbying for it. ("But no 'cos I can prove it 'cos anyway she told me to do it round the bike sheds ages ago")
2) Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton "If they (the Tories) think it's such a bad policy, maybe we'll hear a pledge from them to reverse these tax changes - and so far there's been a deafening silence." ("But yeah you can't listen to them 'cos they never say nuffin good anyway")
3) Ed Balls (junior minister at the Treasury) pointed out that Conservative Chancellor Norman Lamont had cut the dividend tax credit from 25% to 20% in 1993. ("But no 'cos they did that before anyway when they wuz teachers pet so we can't be wrong")
4) A Treasury spokesman blamed pension schemes' recent funding problems on the dotcom crash, pension holidays in the 1980s and 1990s and a rise in life expectancy. ( "but no, see, it was raining and everything, and I tried to get some sherbert, but ... don't blame me")
Except...let's take a look at those one by one ;
1) Lord Turner (director general of the CBI at the time) has emphatically denied the CBI made or would make any such recommendation.
2) Whether the Opposition has an alternative is not an answer to the allegation that Gordon Brown ignored Civil Service advice and ruined our pensions.
3) Lamont's successor Ken Clarke considered but rejected scrapping the dividend because he thought the "downside far outweighed the upside because of the damage it would do to pension funds"
4) A stock market crash (post dot.com) is exactly the reason you need a pensions surplus. Both pensions holidays and rising life expectancy were known and quantified facts well before Brown's 1997 budget.
But yeah, but no, but yeah because m'nan says...
It'd be funny if these weren't grown fucking men running our country.
When did anybody lie?
ReplyDeleteAnonymous said... "When did anybody lie? "
ReplyDeleteerrrmmm - how about Ed Balls saying the CBI were for the proposals ? Or how about the fact that they released the information late on Friday supposedly because there was a Tribunal hearing scheduled in front of the Information Commissioner but in fact it's not for another month ?
Well gobshite has been a naughty boy, not to mention his Balls.
ReplyDeleteGood thing then that frivolous and vexatious FOI requests from news and media organisations costing the Gov't more than £600 a pop are soon to be banned
ReplyDeletepartywhip said..."Well gobshite has been a naughty boy, not to mention his Balls."
ReplyDeleteSuspect Gobshite didn't mention them 'cos he hasn't got any.
Dont be so rude, he most certainly does. He may lose them fairly soon though if good old Ed keeps a fibbin.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Rees-Mogg has a good article about this in the Times (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/william_rees_mogg/article1599770.ece):
ReplyDelete“At every stage there has been prevarication and concealment… The damage that Mr Brown has done to the pension system was done by stealth — there appeared an attempt to conceal at almost every stage. That is not criminal, but equally it is not transparent. It would be cynical to suggest that this is just the normal practice of politics. As a consequence some £100 billion has been drawn out of the pension system. However one thinks that huge sum might have been distributed, it means that many millions of people have lost money, and that tens if not hundreds of thousands are likely to have imposed on them an old age of poverty.”
Perhaps Rees-Mogg would be a good person to interview about the Misrepresentation of the People Act?
Why can't they just say we're sorry, we fucked up, here's what we're going to do about it. Yesterday I saw Blair on TV saying that in the long-term it was the responsible thing to do - he may or may not be right, but that still means they put long term interests above pensioners in poverty and instead of making that clear, tried to stop it being exposed. Well done to the courts for forcing them to release the information. This is exactly the sort of thing we need to know when we're deciding who to vote for.
ReplyDelete