If you’ve seen the pictures of the Houses of Parliament, you’ll see some pretty old people in there. Some of them look well past 65. This is the retirement age in the United Kingdom, at the moment anyway. Now, this isn’t through some kind of admirable work ethic. No. They’re just too senile to remember where they live; or what they were doing before they started dribbling; or why their flies are undone. Either that or the cognac they were drinking that morning has finally leaked out of their addled brains and hit their legs. When they figure out what it is exactly you do to stand up; they’ll leave the Houses of Parliament and find a library or brothel someplace. I presume. I don’t know. What are they doing in there? They could be out enjoying themselves. Maybe a life of listening to your colleagues lying, leeches the life out of your bones and deadens the spirit so that to feel the sun on their parchment like skin, will turn them into ashes.

As for the rest of us, with very few exceptions, we’re looking forward to the day when the big hand, on Big Ben, reaches sixty-five and we can retire. Ten seconds past my own retirement, if I’m still on the premises of the place where I work, it’s only because I'm still in the toilet reading the paper.

But wait. What’s this? I don’t believe it! The government of England is saying many of us who are anticipating retirement, at 65, will have to keep working beyond that age! Even though I’ve got over twenty five years ahead of me before I retire, I already feel like a sad old donkey working a beachfront on some cheap holiday resort; doomed to plod up and down with sand blowing up my crevice and ill mannered children pulling my ears, while fat men with beer bellies bow my back with ample asses of lard and pizza on my weary back.

It just can’t be right. I’ve been paying my national insurance contributions for decades, and I pay taxes. Why on earth should I work any longer than I have to?

Because we're fifty seven billion pounds short of a pension fund!

Who the hell is responsible for that?

Oh, I might have known!

So my retirement plan has bit the dust. I had hoped to spend a couple of decades doing jigsaw puzzles of naked ladies, drinking crates of Guinness on prescription, and whacking people who annoyed me with a jar of Vaseline. I’m bitterly disappointed. And it just seems so wrong somehow, especially when I heard that Tony Blair has granted himself a pension, worth £2.6 million.

Now I don’t begrudge him his wealth. When he retires it would be unrealistic to expect him to get a job stacking shelves for a few pounds an hour like some retired people have to do to make ends meet. He’d be recognised by some old dear, and whacked with her hand bag. Of course, she could be whacking him for a number of things, but in this case, it would be because he was a witness to a robbery, and he kept quiet about it. That’s right; theft; his Chancellor, Gordon Brown, has been taking five billion pounds a year out of the pension fund. And Tony Blair let him.

Now, I don’t pretend to even begin to understand the way the pensions fund works. But then again I have no idea how my car works. I just know when I need it, its there. This was the idea that sold pensions to us in the first place. But now, it doesn’t matter if I understand the intricate workings of it, because it looks like the damn thing has gone. And if it isn’t gone then there isn’t enough to go round; unless you’re Tony Blair, of course. Apparently former Prime Ministers are entitled to a pension of half their salary as soon as they are booted out of office. I believe that’s called, some you win, some you...eh win. Now, under an obscure Act of Parliament, it doesn’t matter how long the Prime Minister has held the position unless he’s worried about getting cramp. He could have been Prime Minister for a week, and he’d still be entitled to the money. That struck me as odd, because in most jobs, if you’re made redundant, you get one weeks pay for every year of your life spent with the company.

And as for the Prime Minister getting the pension no matter how long he’s in the job; maybe the answer to the shortage in the pension fund for the rest of us is quite simple. Each pensioner should be elected as Prime Minister for ten minutes at a time. That way, all the people who will still be paying off the interest on credit cards and loans foisted upon them by banks when they were twelve, under the understanding that the victim could never pay the loan off, can actually be free of debt. Debt as we know is the most insidious form of slavery known to man and is a way of controlling the masses through fear. I just wonder who controls the Prime Minister, because we certainly don’t.

Actually, I was a bit too casual when I mentioned the amount of money we need to find for the pension fund. You know; the fifty-seven billion. That’s because I spent a few incredulous minutes rolling the words around my tongue, as if somebody had smacked me in the mouth and they were my teeth. The first time I said it to myself it was a case of…what! I repeated the words, chopping up the syllables, dicing the grammar, trying to make it easier to digest but no. It still didn’t make the figure any easier to comprehend.

Now when this astronomical figure was popped into the slot in my brain, and clunked into the cavity where understanding lies curled up and waiting, I thought, wait a minute… if we can’t afford pensions, then we couldn’t afford to go to war in Iraq. We certainly can’t afford to maintain a military presence in Iraq. In fact, we can’t maintain a presence outside Buckingham Palace. The Queen will have to have a word with the corgis and stick them at the front gates. There’s already a kennel there, fortunately. Just take the guards out of there, and don’t feed Her Majesty’s dogs, the corgis, for a few days, and nobody will get past them; not without a nasty nibble.

This isn’t a mad as you may think. We need everybody to pull together on this one. I like the idea of making Prince Phillip work for a living too. Get him out there on the balcony as additional security, with a shotgun. He kills mammals to relax. Nobody is going to climb over the fence with him around. He’ll just shoot them and have them stuffed and mounted above the fireplace; and he’s already mad as a bag of Spaniards so he won’t even be prosecuted.

Incidentally, and you may already know this, but for all the fuss about the terrorist threat and national security, the guards outside the palace don’t normally have any rounds or bullets as they are also known, in those rifles. The powers that be have given them big bushy hats. You know the ones, they’ve got the red jackets on and those big bear skin (something Phillip's shot possibly?) hats on. Yes, you know. They look like afros; a bit like Marge Simpson meets Don King, meets several hundred years of tradition, meets a very unlucky bear.

But anyway...

Stick to the point:

This fifty seven billion pounds shortfall in the pension fund is a bit of a problem. At least I thought it was when I heard it first. But then, I remembered, we’ve got loads of money.

The National Lottery for example raised seventeen billion since 1994. As we know, the government told us it was to be for good causes, and surely looking after old people, even the ones that pretend they’re deaf so they can ignore you, is a good cause. And let’s face it; lotteries are in effect a regressive form of taxation. Most of that money comes from the poorer members of society. Poor people buy lottery tickets, rich people buy shares.

Oh, but hang on. Human beings don’t seem to be regarded as good causes. There seems to be a lot of compassion for buildings, but not that much for the living. I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong? Perhaps the less well off in society would be up in arms if the money earmarked for the Royal Opera House was spent on their pensions, instead of ‘art’. Perhaps they think having a place for large women called Hilda to sing like a foghorn in Italian is a worthwhile cause? I happen to think if it stops them from busking and scaring the pigeons, making them drop more shit on my car, then it’s worthwhile, but not everybody is as cultured as I am. It did occur to me that if they shut the fuck up and didn’t sing so loud, then maybe the Opera House wouldn’t need renovating and we could use the money for something else, but there you go.

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. Now I’ve gone and revealed my lack of class by taking the piss out of opera. Sorry. It’s just that giving funds from the lottery to buildings like the opera house represents a sly way of redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich. It is after all the haunt of certain sections of society, and not Missus Smith, the pensioner on the bus holding on to her bag as if it were all she had to get her through to the next pension day; which it possibly is.

Strangely enough, John Major, the last Prime Minister, whose face completely slips my mind, unless I think of a fungal infection I saw on a turtle's arse, would be quite distraught at the thought of the money from the Lottery going towards the health and maintenance of the up and coming generation of pensioners. I find that a little unsporting of him, considering he was the recipient of a pension like the one Tony Blair will get.

In an article called ‘How I Gave Hope to the Poor’ John Major stated his reason for supporting the Lottery. This article is, of course, not one of the one’s I have written. If it was, it would have been titled, ‘You Smug, Sanctimonious, Patronising Lying Bastard’.

John Major says he wanted ‘a rebirth of cultural and sporting life in Britain’ Unfortunately, or at least that’s how the article reads to me, ‘Government has always passed scraps to the arts at the end of the spending round, but never more than scraps. The competing demands of health, education, pensions and defence would always come first’ .

That’s terrible; health and pensions over opera; the barbarians; I can understand why he was so upset, the fuck-wit.

He says that was the reason he ‘set up safeguards to protect Lottery money from Whitehall spending limits’ In other words he ensured the opera house got the money and not a hospital. He ‘created a new department, with cabinet status, to oversee our national heritage'. By national heritage, he means bricks and mortar and obese people showing each other their tonsils while singing German love songs, unfeasibly loud, to women with bosoms the size of two Millennium Domes.

And John Major is quite proud of what he’s done. This is unusual because politicians usually know when they’ve done something stupid and deny it, but he says, ‘It has worked, too. As the millennium approaches, the fruits of this work are beginning to show: new museums, theatres, sports grounds, arts projects and much, much else have opened. There has been a revolution in leisure for a country that has always undervalued its free time'.

He forgot to mention that due to the shortfall in pensions, most of those with the undervalued free time, as he put it, won’t be able to afford to partake in this brave new World of Leisure. Was that all you could manage for a legacy; a revolution of Leisure; sports casual becoming our national dress? It’s not exactly inspiring is it? Thank God we had Churchill to say ‘we shall fight them on the beaches’ during world war two, and not an idiot like John Major. What would he have said to steel the backbone of the British and Commonwealth when the Germans had occupied Europe? ‘We shall fight them…in the new sports facilities, custom made for that sort of thing’.

Actually, sport is quite close to John Major’s heart. He says ‘I had hoped to find funds from the Lottery to put sports teachers into schools.’ I presume this is to beat the kids like they did when I was young? Drill into them that they must buy lottery tickets. It made seventeen billion in the last ten years. If it continues in that vein then we just may be able to raise the pension money. It does strike me as odd that we have to resort to this. I mean, when Tony Blair decided a war would look good when he was writing his memoirs, he didn’t seem to have any trouble raising the funds. I don’t recall him saying can we afford this. Somehow, the £3.7bn we’ve spent so far, appeared from down the back of the sofa.

I must admit, I’m on the verge of cynicism here; sort of standing on the edge of a huge precipice of cynicism actually, with a raging bull heading toward me, galloping toward my back as I peer over the edge. It seems, if we need something for the populace of this country, the politicians, once they’re elected, pat their expensive jackets and say, oh sorry, we’ve got no money in the public purse. They pull the pocket linings out of their pants, and let them flop like a spaniels ears, and deny there is any money to spare; but if war comes along they stick their pockets linings back in, dig deep, and produce nearly four billion pounds sterling.

Funny isn’t it? Finding money for older people is a problem. Spending money on killing people of all ages isn’t. I don’t see why this should be. Perhaps we should give the money we spend on death and mutilation to life and its continuation? It’s ridiculous to think that sometimes we have to do sponsored walks and charity dances and fun runs to keep a hospital ward open, while billions are spent attacking a country that was no threat to us.

Perhaps we should turn it around. Maybe next time our leaders want to illegally invade another country, we could finance it differently. We could give the money we spend on war to pensions or education or the health service, and finance the war by a charity dance or a car boot sale? We could have a sponsored fun run; only the guy with the starter pistol shoots you in the back just so we don’t forget what life under Saddam Hussein was like.

Mind you, the arms trade is quite happy. Business is booming (forgive the pun).

Sorry.

Back to pensions:

Oh, they did…?

Right…

Well, moving swiftly on…

Now, in , we have someone called the Pensions Secretary. His name is David Blunkett. And he happens to be blind, which makes his progress up the slippery pole of politics all the more admirable. Understandably, he’s worried about this shortfall so I’m going to send him a letter with the following suggestions.

Now I can just hear the Duke saying ‘hang on, old boy. That’s a bit unfair’.

True. How do you think all the people who were expecting a pension feel? Just so you don’t feel too bad, we’ll leave you with a couple of million. Consider it like this. Imagine we are at war (which we are, by the way, I keep forgetting about the war on terror). Your country needs you. You’ve just been drafted, and the good thing is, you don’t have to lay down your life, just your cheque book. I mean, if young men can be expected to do it from time to time, then surely this can’t be too much of a sacrifice? In fact, we have no reason to believe you would do no less yourself, if you were called upon. Your courage is not in question, merely your generosity and compassion.

It’s nothing personal.

In fact, you can have a front row seat when we dangle Sir Paul McCartney, a notorious tight wad, upside down until the last penny of his three quarters of a billion pound rolls across the floor of the Albert Hall. He doesn’t need all that. We do. He can keep a couple of million as well. And while we’re at it, Sting can shut the fuck up about rain forests and put some money on the table. £150 million and he too, gets to keep a couple of million.

Tantric sex is out.

Tantric compassion is in.

Oh and while we're at it, we're going to have a little Tantric (whatever that is) Education for David Blunkett, bless him. He said it was clear that people needed to start saving more money earlier in their lives to pay for their old age. I find that a particularly dumb thing to say.

It seems that people who don’t earn enough to have a good private pension are not poor because they don’t have enough money. It’s because they didn’t save the money they don’t have in private pension schemes that they haven’t got. Now if I was a pensioner who had worked in low paid jobs because that was all I could do, and trustingly paid my National Insurance contributions, which I was promised from 1947 would pay for my pension, and David Blunkett had said that to my face, then I would have been tempted to slap him; except for the fact that his guide dog would have probably whipped my testicles off faster than you can say ‘down Shep!’

Now it may just be me, but David Blunkett is acting like a mean old Scrooge of an uncle talking to a feckless child in some kind of Dickensian nightmare. He says that people cannot rely on the State to dig them out of poverty. I agree with him, but only in the sense that you can’t trust government to distribute the riches of a country downward to the majority of the people. They will let it be sucked upward into the vacuum of billionaires’ bank accounts where it gathers interest, pulling more money out of the economy. That is one thing you can trust them to do. Under new pension rules coming into effect in 2006, the rich will be able to stash up to £215,000 tax free every year, which means, the government is going to give approximately four billion pounds to the rich.

I appreciate the honesty of David Blunkett, the Minister for Pensions being honest in admitting that he hasn’t a clue what to do about the shortfall in pensions. I just wish the government in general would be as honest and admit they do not know what they are talking about when it says there isn’t enough money to go round.

Here is one example of where the money can be raised:

National Insurance contributions

This year the Inland Revenue will collect £3.4 billion more than it spends on benefits. The total surplus, counting up previous years is expected to be £34.6 billion by March 31, 2006.

Over the next four years, this “spare” money will double to around £47 billion.

So….what actually is the problem? There is no shortfall in the pension fund. There is plenty of money in the pot.

Tell the pensioners to relax.

We can still afford to have illegal wars (eh…whoopee-do) if the government so decides.

And the Duke of Westminster can stop barricading his door.

Paul McCartney can continue to be a tight fisted git.

Sting can have his mansion and good luck to him.

Prince Phillips will be disappointed that he can’t shoot interlopers but we all have to make a sacrifice.

John Major need not worry that the Lottery money will be spent on the needs of the poor.

David Blunkett can stop patronising us by stating the fucking obvious!

And even Tony Blair will be happy, because we have discovered the Weapons of Mass Deception that we went to war for.

Apparently, it was all a big lie…a bit like the shortage in the pension fund. What the government is actually saying is, we have loads of money, but not for you lot. I find that odd, because surely the Government actually has no money of it's own? All the money that the Treasury has, is ours. Or at least it was. This doesn't seem to be the case now and that, at the very least resembles theft, does it not? It also reminds me of the line about poverty...

Brother, can you spare a Crime...

I'm sure if the government looked hard enough, it would find one.
Below is the link for the figures I used.
Click Here

Geetan