PENSIONERS have been battling against VAT on fuel and defence of their travel concessions: but the abiding problem which must be confronted is the pitiful and declining level of the state pension, which has been slashed to the bone in sixteen years of Tory rule.
Britain spends a smaller proportion of national income on pensions than most member states of the European Union. Pension costs amounted to 9.6 percent of GDP in Britain, about the same as Greece, but well below France (12.7%) Belgium (12%) and Germany (11.7%).
Only Portugal and Ireland (6.9% and 7.1%) spend less on pensions than Britain.
The actual value of the basic state pension has been dwindling as the Tories sought ways of cutting public spending and forcing people of working age to fork out large sums to private 'personal pension' schemes.
In the 1970s the single person's pension was 20 percent of average male industrial earnings. By the early 1990s it had dropped to just 15 percent, and if present policies are unchanged it will reduce to just 9 percent in 2020 and 6 Arcent in 2040.
A major factor in this decline has been Thatcher's decision in 1980 to break the link between pensions and earnings: the money saved by this is currently running at £10 billion a year, while ever greater numbers of pensioners are falling into dire poverty and having to apply for income support.
Yet the irony is that while the pensions budget has been slashed back, Britain is among the least vulnerable of all the European countries to the 'demographic time bomb', in which the population contains a declining proportion of people of working age compared with numbers of pensioners.
There is clearly plenty of cash in the economy: it's just that the Tories have given most of it to the rich, and Labour lacks the courage to grab it from them.
The Tory attack on state pensions served a threefold purpose: to cut state spending, to boost private pension firms, and to shackle workers to company pension plans.
In fact, while insecurity has grown, with no section of workers apparently immune, there is little evidence that the private sector can compensate for the growing gaps in collective state pension provision.
Savings
The amount of savings required to finance a decent retirement pension through a 'personal pension' is extortionate, meaning that only the bestpaid workers could even hope to finance their own retirement.
But company schemes are also in rapid decline, as firms drive towards increasing casualisation of their workforce and shrink from the costs
LABOUR
of pension schemes which are no longer seen as needed to attract staff in today's labour market.
In 1981 employers' contributions to pension schemes amounted to 3.2 percent of GDP: in ten years it fell to just 1.2 percent.
To make matters worse, the pension funds to which workers look for security in old age have been among the most aggressive investors pushing for increased profits - where necessary through rationalisation - often triggering redundancies and closures.
As the Guardian's Will Hutton, the new guru of the middle classes, points out "The British have been stripped of their state pension for reasons of bogus economy and offered a system in its place which is hazardous, little understood and requires a level of saving that is beyond most of them."
Tony Blair's Labour Party is eloquently silent on pensions, and certainly making no effort to echo the 1992 commitment and argue for interim increases of £8 per week for single pensioners and £15 for couples as a first step in repairing the damage that has been done.
No doubt the party that now foolishly chides the Tories for its tax increases is fearful that any serious attack on the problem of poverty-line pensions requires radical steps to reclaim the lavish tax hand-outs to the rich which the Tories financed by ripping off the elderly.
Between 1979 and the 1990s the richest 20 percent increased their share of disposable income from 36 percent to 43 percent, while the share of the poorest 20 percent declined from 10% to just 6%.
Had the percentages stayed the same, the richest would be sharing WELFARE STATE £35 billion less, while the poorest would have gained an extra 23000 per household on present figures.
Even government figures show that a single pensioner in the poorest section of society is over £13 a week worse off in 1994 prices than in 1979.
The Tories keep assuring us that the economy is on the mend: but somehow British capitalism can never quite afford to support the elderly.
The wholesale switch of priorities from private greed to social need calls for a radical, socialist policy, steeply progressive taxation on the wealthy and corporate profits, and bold steps to take control of company pension funds to avoid more Maxwell-style plunder and prevent these funds being used in speculation against the interests of the workers paying into them.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 81, April 8 1995. Page 8.