Private pensions may one day boom again
As the row over "gold-plated" pensions in the public sector rages, I pick up my old, yellowing and somewhat crumbling cuttings book from the 1980s, writes Peter Rhodes.
As the row over "gold-plated" pensions in the public sector rages, I pick up my old, yellowing and somewhat crumbling cuttings book from the 1980s,
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And guess what? History repeats itself. I wrote a piece way back then contrasting the lavish salary-linked pensions of the town-hall brigade with the much smaller pensions of people retiring from private companies.
To make the point, it was illustrated with a cartoon of two neighbours.
The poorer of the two lived in a shabby, run-down house called Dungraftin.
The richer, off in his gleaming limousine with his golf clubs, had called his house Dunbureaucrattin. So what happened next?
In the years that followed, public-sector pensions began to look feeble.
The Stock Market took off, private pensions boomed and suddenly we didn't envy the civil servants any more. It may yet happen again.
