Your state pension is a socialist bribe

Every four weeks the government sends me my state pension. Those words have a socialist, almost Soviet, ring. The amount has recently risen to £11,973 a year – a preposterous sum to send a 67-year-old man still in paid employment. But from the state’s point of view, the money is not entirely wasted: it buys a kind of loyalty. Because I accept the money, and do so with a certain pleasure, I am bound into the system and am less likely to say it’s a bad one. I’ve allowed myself to become a dependent. I may criticise the way the welfare state is run and demand improvements in the administration of one or another part of it, but I have become less likely to challenge the principle of the whole thing.

This is bad, because we’re heading for a smash. According to Sir John Kingman, late of HM Treasury and now chairman of Legal & General, we are ‘treading a very delicate path, along a cliff edge in deep fog’. Our national debt, which at the start of this century was about a third of GDP, is now roughly equal to it, and the interest payments are well over £100 billion a year. Liz Truss did not see how near the cliff edge was and began stumbling over it, so out she went. Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves persuaded themselves that the black hole in the public finances was a mere £22 billion, a ludicrous underestimate. But when it comes to ignoring the edge’s proximity and believing one’s own propaganda, Nigel Farage makes Truss look like a novice. He is also the bookies’ favourite to be the next prime minister.