Spot the difference
THE state pension is one of the Treasury's proudest achievements. It may not buy much, so the mandarins say, but it buys as much as it used to, and just think what it has saved. Years ago the Treasury managed to make the pension inflation-linked rather than earnings-linked. This sounded techni- cal, not to say dull, and at first no one noticed the difference. They do now, which is why ministers had braced themselves for a torrid time at their party conference but where would the public finances have been without this achievement, and where might they be in the future? The Chancel- lor promised a pension fudge for next year but refused to break the link. If ministers are embarrassed, that, to the mandarins' way of thinking, is what they are there for.
Previous page
