Will ‘Wrecking-ball’ Reeves destroy all our pensions?

Friday- weekend blog

I posted this blog on Friday. But have added a bit at the end so will leave this up for the weekend

Reeves’s cunning plan?

I wanted to write about robbing wrecker Rachel Reeves’s great new plans to annihilate our pensions industry in order for her to create the impression of economic growth. But I didn’t find much in today’s news reports about Reeves’s Thursday evening Mansion House speech explaining what robber Reeves was intending.

Prior to Thursday evening’s Mansion House speech, we were told that Chancellor Rachel Reeves will lead a shake-up of the pensions market that the government hopes will unlock tens of billions of pounds of investment in business and infrastructure.

In her Mansion House speech on Thursday, Reeves was expected to outline plans to merge council pension schemes into “megafunds” in what she describes as the “biggest pension reform in decades”.

The first step of Reeves’s asault on people’s pension savings would see the UK�s 86 council pension schemes pool their collective assets into a small number of ‘pension megafunds’. Reeves hopes this will lead to �80 billion being invested in energy infrastructure, public services and tech start-ups.

The key words for me are the claim that ‘this will lead to �80 billion being invested in energy infrastructure, public services and tech start-ups‘. Let’s take just two of the above intended targets for Reeves’s great ‘investment’ plans:

• Energy infrastructure – that means wasting billions of pensioners’ money on crazed Marxist Ed Miliband’s usless, economically-suicidal wind and solar farms, the hopeless and expensive carbon capture that will never work and other Heath Robinsonian schemes – pumping water uphill, giant wheels, hydrogen etc – to supposedly store electricity when the wind isn’t blowing (or is blowing too strongly) and the sun isn’t shining (most of the time in Britain)

• Public services – you don’t invest’ in public services. The definition of ‘invest’ is: “put (money) into financial schemes, shares, property, or a commercial venture with the expectation of achieving a profit”. With public services, you don’t invest, you just spend. And as we can reliably predict, any more money put into our failing, ludicrously-misnamed ‘public services’ will just be squandered on stuff like diversity nonsense, huge salary increases, employing ever more waste-of-skin bureaucrats and allowing public-sector parasites to do just 2 or 3 days a week (mostly skiving at home) for a 5-days-a-week salary

The benefits?

Reeves has said that public sector pension funds are not currently big enough to generate good returns.

Around 6.7 million local government workers currently have a pension that is based on their length of service and salary – what is known as a defined benefit pension. This is in contrast to most private sector schemes that involve paying into a savings pot each month and hoping te investment returns will provide you with sufficient to live on in your golden years.

The payments these workers make will not change. Instead, the government will set a minimum size requirement for the defined benefits schemes. Larger funds will, in theory, generate greater returns and be more efficient to run, says our trustworthy government. And no doubt, Reeves and her highly-experienced team at the Treasury will decide where the many tens of billions will be ‘invested’.

Wrecking-ball Reeves strikes again

Having taken her fiscal wrecking ball to most businesses with her massive national insurance and business rates tax increases, to farmers with her inheritance tax imposition, to about 10 million pensioners by swiping their winter fuel allowance and to ordinary working people, especially part-time workers, who will see their pay squeezed and many of whom will lose their jobs as their employers struggle to pay Reeves’s ‘job taxes’, it seems that Reeves has realised that she’s destroying the British economy rather than encouraging growth. No problem, by confiscating around 6.7 million local government workers’ pension savings, Reeves can pour tens of billions into Potemkin-style make-work fantasies to give the false impression of GDP growth.

The only amusing aspect of this mass impoverishment of the retirement of 6.7 million people is that they’re public-sector employees and thus mostly Labour-voting. It will be fun to see their reactions when Reeves does a magical disappearing act on their pensions.

However, our amusement will be short-lived. Public-sector pensions are ‘defined benefit’- pensioners are guaranteed a certain amount on retirement. – If Reeves eviscerates them by forcing them to pour money into idiotic government schemes like Miliband’s energy-destruction madness, then one solution Reeves might use to make up the shortfall could be to increase our taxes. However, as she is already bleeding us dry, I suspect that Reeves will use some kind of financial legerdemain to fill the public-sector pension black hole her policies have created.

For example, Reeves could force private-sector pension companies to pour billions into the schemes which have lost public-sector pension money. This would then boost the share prices of the companies, which have lost public-sector pension billions, and create the impression that the public-sector pension funds were adequately funded.

However, this would just be a government-run Ponzi scheme as eventually the private-sector money would dry up, the share prices would collapse and both public-sector and private-sector pension funds would be on the verge of insolvency. But why would Reeves give a toss about her destruction of the UK’s pension industry? By the time that happens, she’ll be happily ensconced in the Lords and have a highly-paid, highly-pensioned taxfree sinecure with some useless, parasitic organisation like the International Money Fund or the World Bank or the World Economic Forum.