They are reviving the Pensions Commission. As if what’s broken can be fixed with another review. As if we haven’t been here before. New Labour déjà vu, again. Liz Kendall, who couldn’t be further right in the Labour Party if she tried, wants to “tackle the barriers” to pension saving. What she means is: make it your fault. You didn’t save enough. You didn’t plan. You didn’t budget. It’s all a personal failure. Never mind wages have stagnated for 15 years. Never mind rent takes half your income. Never mind the markets are on fire.
It’s not a retirement system. It’s a trapdoor. And they’ve been slowly sawing through the floorboards for decades.
Final salary schemes are dead. You know this. Your parents might have had one if they were lucky. Defined benefit. Work, retire, draw a pension linked to what you earned. Solid. Predictable. Socially useful. Now? All but gone outside the public sector, and even there, slowly strangled.
What’s left is defined contribution. You chuck money in a pot. That pot goes into the stock market. If you’re lucky, and I mean lucky, there’s something there when you hit 68 (or 70, or 75, whenever they decide you can afford to die). You are not saving for retirement. You are gambling on your future.
And the odds are getting worse.
The Market Eats Your Pension
The whole system relies on the idea that markets go up. But they don’t. Not in the ways they used to. We have had a financial crash, a bond market shock (the Truss), Brexit (the Farage), Covid (the Johnson), inflation, war, a Donald Trump (twice), climate collapse. Those “1-in-50 year” events are now happening every five years, if not sooner. Volatility isn’t the exception. It’s the rule.
When you tie pensions to capital markets, the only people guaranteed a return are the fund managers.
The DWP says pensioner income is falling. The people retiring in 2050 will get less than the ones retiring today. That’s not a safety net. That’s slow-motion generational theft.
“Just Save More” With What?
Kendall talks about helping people save. But save what, exactly? Half the country isn’t saving into a pension at all. Because they can’t. Rent. Food. Energy bills. Debt. One in four low earners in the private sector aren’t in a scheme. Three million self-employed aren’t saving. For Pakistani and Bangladeshi workers, just one in four are covered. And then there is the gender gap: women approaching retirement have £5,000 less in private pension income than men. But the commission says: don’t worry. We’ll publish recommendations. In 2027.
By then, the Tories could be back. Or Farage. Or some even worse mutation.
The Dignity Trap
Liz Kendall loves the word dignity. Dignity in work. Dignity in retirement. But only if it’s earned. Only if you’ve saved. Only if you’ve kept up your end of the deal. It’s the language of virtue, polished, moral, and punishing.
It’s not dignity. It’s Protestant work ethic repackaged for the post-Thatcher welfare state.
This is Blairism at its most moralistic: the idea that social rights aren’t rights at all, but rewards. You don’t get security because you exist. You get it if you prove yourself. Through work. Through self-reliance. Through individual responsibility. The collective disappears, and what remains is the sermon.
It’s a politics that moralises poverty and personalises risk. You didn’t save enough? You lacked discipline. Your pension’s gone? You should have planned better. Can’t afford to retire? Work longer. That’s the deal.
It’s not about dignity. It’s about deservingness. And the price of being seen as undeserving gets higher every year.
Auto-Enrolment: The Illusion of Security
Yes, 88% of eligible workers are now enrolled in pensions. But most are saving the minimum. Which is nothing. It’s the appearance of security, without the substance. Like a cardboard safe. It looks reassuring, until you open it and find dust.
Auto-enrolment helped increase the number of accounts. It didn’t increase the size of pots. Most people will retire with too little to live on, and too much to qualify for support. This isn’t a policy gap. It’s the system working exactly as designed: just enough to stop mass panic, not enough to live on.
They are Coming for the Last Good Pensions
Even the last fragments of retirement security (the public sector schemes) are under attack. Civil servants, council workers, NHS staff, teachers. The people who kept this country running through austerity, through Covid, through decades of cutbacks and blame.
They were never paid generously. That was the deal: lower wages now, a dignified pension later. Public duty offset by public recognition. But that social contract is being torched.
Reform UK want to scrap “gold-plated” pensions. The Tories mutter about “unaffordable liabilities”. Labour won’t defend them in public. And the press spins fantasies of bureaucrats living it up on taxpayer largesse.
This is not about fairness. It’s about revenge. The last decent pensions in Britain are seen as a provocation—a reminder of what we once had, and what we could have again.
Rather than raise everyone up, the political class would rather pull the last rungs off the ladder. That’s what their “levelling down” really means.
The public sector was once the floor beneath which society wouldn’t fall. Now it’s the ceiling they’re desperate to smash.
The Real Barrier Is the System
They will talk about fairness. They willl talk about “cross-party consensus”. They will put Nick Pearce and a Barclays chair on the commission and call it balanced. But you can’t solve a structural problem with managerial tweaks. You can’t legislate away the fact that capitalism doesn’t want workers to retire. It wants them to keep producing or die trying.
The postwar pension settlement was based on full employment, strong unions, rising wages, and a social state that still half-believed in dignity. That world’s gone. Long gone. We now have precarity, zero-hours, “self-employed” delivery workers with no protection, no assets, and no pension. And no one in power is serious about fixing it.
The rich don’t worry about pensions. They own assets. The rest of us? We own anxiety.
Gambling with Your Future
And now Rachel Reeves wants to go a step further. Not content with workers carrying all the risk, she wants to “unlock” pension surpluses to fund British business. It sounds innocuous, until you realise what it means: your retirement tied to the fate of FTSE-listed firms and shaky UK startups.
They call it “productive finance.” In reality, it’s a transfer of risk. From capital to labour, from shareholders to savers. If it works, the firms profit. If it doesn’t, your pension takes the hit.
There’s no mention of restoring defined benefit schemes. No plan to raise employer contributions. No vision of universal dignity in old age. Just a new way to put your money to work, for someone else.
The surplus isn’t surplus. It’s deferred wages. It’s yours. And now they want to gamble it on capitalism’s last roll of the dice.
No Answers, Just Another Punt
This isn’t a plan. It’s a punt. Reeves’s push to raid pension surpluses and hand them over to the same firms that tanked the economy in the first place shows you everything you need to know: the government has no answers. No vision. No will to confront capital. Just a desperate search for leverage in a system that’s already collapsing.
She got short shrift from almost everyone. Fund managers warned it would put retirements at risk. Pension trustees called it reckless. Even the banks (hardly defenders of the working class) pushed back. Lloyds politely told her to get lost. The numbers didn’t stack up. The supposed £160 billion surplus turned out to be closer to £11 billion.
They’re not fixing the pension crisis—they’re feeding it into the machine.
Rather than boost wages, rebuild the social state, or guarantee security in retirement, they’re trying to squeeze growth out of your future. When it all goes wrong (and it will) it won’t be CEOs who pay. It will be you. Your pension, your risk, their profit. That’s not reform. That’s looting in slow motion.
No Home, No Pension, No Future
It used to be that even if your pension was modest, you would have a roof over your head. You would own your home outright, or have a secure council tenancy. Not anymore. The retirement model assumed housing security, it never planned for a generation priced out, renting at extortionate rates into their seventies.
There’s no safety net now. No final salary scheme, no affordable rent, no chance of buying. Just a collapsing rental market, frozen council house waiting lists, and landlords who treat tenants like revenue streams. When the pension runs out, what exactly is left?
You can’t eat equity. You can’t retire in a cardboard box.
The entire system was built on assumptions that no longer hold. Yet the politicians act like it’s your fault for not saving, not planning, not trying hard enough. But you can’t plan a future when the ground keeps falling away beneath you.
What Would It Mean to Start Again?
A real solution would mean:
- A universal, guaranteed pension. De-linked from stock markets and private profit.
- A comfortable retirement as a right, not a privilege.
- Redistribution from capital to labour. Not “nudges” or “incentives”, but power.
- Shorter working lives, not longer ones. Because what is the point of living longer if you’re working until you die?
But no one in this government, or the last one, or the one before that, wants to talk about that. Because they know it would require going after the people who actually have the money. And that, in Britain, is still taboo.
So instead, they give us a Commission. A press release. And a promise that they will look into it.
You Can’t Retire on a White Paper
They call it sustainability. But what they are really saying is: you are on your own.
Retirement isn’t a phase of life anymore. It’s a privilege for the wealthy, a stress dream for the rest. You are meant to work longer, save harder, die quicker. That’s the deal. Unless we break it.
Let’s not pretend this can be fixed with stakeholder roundtables. The pension system doesn’t need reform. It needs dismantling. Then we build something that works, for all of us. Not the markets. Not the fund managers. Us.
