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Extract from 'Littlejohn's Britain' By Richard Littlejohn, Daily Mail, May 2, 2007 Remember when Labour used to sneer at the Tories for 'selling off the family silver'? That was when Mrs. Thatcher was returning lumbering, inefficient nationalised industries to private ownership. Strange - you don't hear Labour protesting about Gordon's despicable record on pensions. Not for nothing did I christen him the Man Who Stole Your Old Age. Here's the deal! If in 1997, Gordon had promised to steal your pension and make you work until you're 70, would you still have voted Labour? Especially if he said that the money he took from you would be used to hire hundreds of thousands of utterly useless and superfluous public-sector workers? And
while you could look forward to a miserable old age living on
bread and scrape, all these new inspectors, coordinators and outreachers
would be guaranteed gold-plated, index-linked pensions of their
own - paid for out of YOUR taxes? Well, that's what happened. As soon as he got his feet under the table of Number 11, Gordon mounted a smash-and-grab raid on pension funds. Back then, his act of grand larceny raked in £5billion a year. Today, its £8billion and rising. Britain is facing a pensions black hole of over £60billion - a large slice of which is down to Gordon's greed, which has cost us getting on for £50billion. The rest is because of a collapse in the stock market following Gordon's tax raid, which discouraged pension funds from investing. So while foreign stock markets were rising by up to 45%, Britain's stagnated. RESULT: WE'RE ALL THE POORER. Correction: We're not ALL poorer. Only those of us who rely on private pensions or the basic state pension. Those who work for the state are quids-in. If you're lucky enough to be employed by the civil service, or the NHS, or your local town hall, reach for those Saga brochures and start planning your round-the-world cruise right now. It used to be argued that public sector workers got better job security and pensions in exchange for far lower wages than they could earn in private industry. But that went out of the window years ago. Most of the jobs advertised every week in the Guardian offer salaries at least equal to those outside - and often higher. Thanks to Gordon's largesse with our taxes, we now have £115,000-a-year NHS diversity supremos and £26,500-a-year cotton nappy coordinators. Id don;t know how we ever managed without them. In 2005, MPs voted themselves £25million of our money to make up their pension shortfall. You would need a fund of at least £1million to get anywhere near the kind of pension one of our elected representatives can look forward to. Dream on. His tax strategey is to fleece the South of England An MP on £57,000 today can expect an index-linked pension of £93,000 in 26 years. A private-sector employee - same age, same salary, same contributions - will be lucky to get £22,300. Politicians know how to look after themselves. Derry Irvine, Blair's old boss, trousered a pension fund worth £2.3million after just five years as Lord Chancellor - all courtesy of the taxpayer. No chance of any of Labour's cronies ending up selling the Big Issue in the Strand, with a dog on a piece of string, or huddled round one bar of an electric fire, dining on a tin of Whiskas. Brown's daylight robbery is compounded by the fact that he has done all he can to make the system as complicated as possible, so that very few people can understand it. That's because of his control freakery. Gordon's like the swot in the maths class who sat at the back, hunched over his exercise book, terrified anyone else would get a peek. At first sight on someone approaching, he'd hide it in his desk and throw his body over it. The Man Who Stole Your Old Age can himself look forward to a retirement income of around £100,000, index-linked, courtesy of the British taxpayer. That would need a pot of over £3million in the private sector. But, of course, even the select few who could amass such a fund would be insane to do so, given that Gordon sneaked through a usurious tax of 55% on everything over £1.5million. Naturally, that supertax doesn't apply to the pensions of prime ministers. And Gordon has always believed it was his divine right to inherit the keys to Number 10, without bothering to trouble the electorate first. Brown has spent 11 years in a vengeful sulk At last year's Labour conference, he gave his full Prime Minister-in-waiting routine. But his speech was an object lesson in duplicity and denial. Here was the man who once told Tony Blair: "There is nothing you could say to me now that I could possibly believe", ladling praise upon the Prime Minister's head like a short-order chef pouring hollandaise sauce over eggs Benedict. Gordon's gofers have been peddling poison about Blair for as long as I can remember, ever since the infamous Granita deal. Having convinced himself he wuz robbed, Gordon has spent 11 years in a vengeful sulk. Never has the distinction between a ray of sunshine and a Scotsman with a grievance been more pronounced. In politics, judge a man by what he does, not what he says. On that basis, his speech at the 2006 conference was a symphony of mendacity. The Man Who Stole Your Old Age had the nerve to stand on the platform and speak about his commitment to reducing poverty. He talked about a new partnership between government and the voluntary sector - but refused tax breaks on charitable giving. He boasted of his intention to solve the housing crisis - which he has exacerbated by colluding in mass, uncontrolled immigration, while at the same time presiding over an inheritance-tax regime which means thousands of vulnerable people will have to sell their homes to pay his punitive death duties. And what about all those elderly folk in England and Wales who are having to sell their houses to finance long-term care? If they lived in Scotland, they wouldn't have to. North of the border, long-term care is free- thanks to lavish subsidies paid out of English taxes. Same with university tuition fees, which the Scots don't pay either. The fact is that Gordon has been the most powerful member of the Cabinet and he has controlled the purse strings. Every major decision of the past ten years - including the war in Iraq - has his fingerprints on it. We've been told repeatedly that Gordon is the 'real' Prime Minister. Now we're asked to forget all that and swallow the idea that he's the new broom. If he wants a different kind of Britain, he's had ten years to make it happen. Why tell us now? That speech at the party conference was supposed to be Gordon's Agincourt moment. My guess is that it was the start of his swansong. He even managed to get himself upstaged by the Wicked Witch, who stole the headlines the following day. She was standing by a TV monitor, watching the speech. When Gordon got to the part where he was telling the delegates what a privilege it had been working with her husband, the WW barked: "That's a lie", and stomped off. For once in my life, I agreed with the Wicked Witch.
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