As we have seen so often elsewhere during this economic crisis, conservatives (in this case the Conservative Party) is planning to throw the pain onto the working people while life remains easy going for those who caused the crisis. If this leaked paper is accurate, strikes may be coming soon to the UK. The Guardian:
The stakes were raised further on Thursday when two of the biggest and most militant unions, the Public and Commercial Services Union and Unite, signed an accord pledging to fight "vicious" spending cuts.In another fine example of right wing moral leadership, British PM extended the privilege of a photo-op in front of 10 Downing Street with the crown prince of Bahrain. As in the same Bahrain where civilians are being executed on the streets because they dared to protest.
The leaked "discussion paper", written by the chief secretary to the treasury Danny Alexander, reveals that the government proposes to raise the retirement age to 66 for most state employees, and replace final salary schemes with pensions based on career salary averages. Contributions will increase by 3.3 percentage points with some protection for those earning less than £15,000 or £18,000.But it goes further, changing the rate of accruals so that the proportion of the average salary accrued for each year worked is reduced. Currently new teachers accrue one 60th of their final salary for every year they work, meaning they have to work for thirty years to receive half their annual salary in pension when they retire. The models in the paper suggest that this should rise to either one 80th, 90th or 100th, of the salary accrued for each year worked. It means some public sector workers would have to work ten years longer to get half of their average salary.
