Britain’s public sector pensions bill is now larger than the size of the U.K. economy after it soared past £2.6 trillion for the first time, official figures show. The Telegraph has more.
The Treasury said NHS pension liabilities alone had climbed above £1 trillion, while the cost of future pension promises to millions of public sector workers including doctors, civil servants and teachers ballooned by £333bn to reach £2.64 trillion in the 2021-22 financial year.
The jump in liabilities was driven by a substantial downgrade to Britain’s growth prospects, which raises the predicted cost of funding gold-plated final salary or career average schemes that offer a guaranteed income on retirement.
Sir Steve Webb, a former pensions minister, described the £2.6 trillion figure as “eye-watering” and larger than the size of Britain’s economy.
He said: “If the economy is growing more sluggishly, then the future wealth of the nation is going to be smaller than you thought. So it’s going to be more painful to pay these promises.”
While millions of public sector workers still benefit from gold-plated final salary pensions, most who work in the private sector rely on defined contribution (DC) schemes that link pension payouts to the performance of financial markets.
There are just 700,000 members of active private sector defined benefit schemes across the U.K., according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). By contrast, millions of public sector workers still benefit from guaranteed DB schemes.
The Treasury figures show NHS pension liabilities now stand at just over £1 trillion. The scheme, which has more than 1.5 million members, is on course to grow even further in the coming years as the Government implements its workforce plan to increase the permanent workforce from 1.4 million to 2.3 million in 2036-37.
It means one in 11 workers could work for the NHS in a decade.
The figures also showed the estimated cost of funding civil service pensions had climbed from £339bn to £377bn in 2021-22. Pension provisions for NHS staff, teachers, civil servants and the armed forces account for most of Britain’s unfunded pensions liabilities.
Worth reading in full.
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The demise of the Indian solar floater was hilarious. I’ll use that video to cheer me up when I become fed up with all this guff.
It was obviously designed by a committee of humanities graduates without an ounce of common sense.
“I know, let’s string together 10,000 of those things people put on their roofs, float them out to sea and charge people for the juice. It’s so green it can’t fail! People like ‘green’. This time next year Rodney my son we’ll be millionaires”
“Unemployed Britons to do migrant jobs under Labour plans”
That, as if we needed more evidence, confirms Labour are totally out of touch with reality.
I thought they were just ‘jobs’ didn’t know they were classified by residential status!
And, at the end of the season, do they return to their country of origin?
Do they mean Indian British, British Indians, etc, and are ‘migrant jobs’ just the seasonal jobs, or the low paid jobs?
Are legal/illegal migrants excluded from this employment scheme?
Russia ‘could disable British nuclear deterrent in one day’ in war”
I don’t doubt it. I would have thought one hour was more probable. All this brave talk by our politicians about fighting a country a couple of thousand miles away, with an army we don’t have anymore is just folly. The average Joe like me can see it. I wonder why they persist.?
I very much doubt it.
Ukraine is firing home made cruise missiles at Russia almost daily, with impunity…..and with considerable success.
That is so funny. Where do you get these from?
Your talking to AI. Time is better spent chatting to a baked bean can.
Definitely human. AI wouldn’t get so much wrong.
Hot off the press. Here is the warhead
We were told this was very successful at the start of the conflict, especially when used by female operatives.
Ukrainian forces conducted a series of missile strikes against Russia on 30 and 31 May.
Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) conducted a successful strike against a Russian “Nebo-IED” long-range radar system near occupied Armyansk, Crimea. The radar system reportedly serviced a 380-kilometer-long section of the frontline, and Ukrainian forces reportedly observed a shutdown of the radar’s radiation signature indicating that the strike took the system offline.
Ukrainian forces conducted a strike on an oil depot near the port of Kavkaz, Krasnodar Krai with several Neptune anti-ship missiles early in the morning on May 31, and geolocated footage published on May 31 shows a fire at the oil depot.
Krasnodar Krai Governor Veniamin Kondratyev stated that the strike damaged three petroleum tanks at an oil depot in Temryuk Raion. Russian opposition outlet Astra stated that Ukrainian forces struck at least two additional facilities at the port and damaged a substation that provides power to the Kerch Strait Bridge.
Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukraine also struck a railway train carrying fuel near the oil depot.
Whoopeee. have they reached the Sea of Azov yet?
On a more serious note, since I can no longer edit my other comment, these pin-prick attacks are not part of any strategic plan, they are vengeance attacks trying to create positive headlines for Ukraine.
You cannot even start to compare these with the systematic destruction of the entire Ukrainian non-nuclear energy production system which Russia has nearly completed. NASA picture from March 7.
‘In war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one’ Bonaparte
‘When it comes to restoring any country, the most crucial factor isn’t money or the size of the population; the attitude of those living there and those who will return is far more important. Without their faith in the future, no amount of investment will work.
And in this sense, things look optimistic for Ukraine. According to the Rating Group’s polls, despite all the hardships of wartime life and the setbacks at the front, 80 percent of Ukrainians believe their country’s future looks “rather promising.’
https://ratinggroup.ua/research/ukraine/absolyutna-bilshist-ukrayinciv-virit-u-peremogu-nad-rosiyeyu-pidtrimuyut-chlenstvo-v-yes-ta-nato.html
It’s very unlikely the Russians would do that.
“Never Interfere With an Enemy While He’s in the Process of Destroying Himself”
And the Russians certainly know that. Which reminds me, I those Minsk Agreements look more generous by the day.
“Starmer must introduce wealth tax after Labour wins election, top Blair aide says”
Always the ‘wealthy’. Life’s perpetual underachievers vent their envy.
Define ‘wealthy’… once they’ve skimmed the obvious, they’ll just be left with everyone else who’s been the least bit prudent.
Anyone with more than me.
And it’s always the Money: Socialists are like that.
More Political Influence? No.
More Free Time? No.
While we think of Trickle Down Economics as creating opportunities for wealth creation, Life’s perpetual underachievers think of escalating unemployment benefit.
“Scrap VAT plan if OBR says it will not raise money, Starmer told”
After causing enormous damage already to the private school sector, I would put all my money on the old Flip-Flopper having to backtrack. Its nailed on.
Maybe Labour will delay or back track but the damage has been done. The risk in private education has been raised several notches. Similarly with personal pensions whose beneficiaries are now very concerned about changes to limits on withdrawals and enforced “investment” in government mandated investmant classes.
With the Tories undermining private residential letting and holiday homes businesses, Labour undermining the above plus more, the risk factors for a wide range of legitimate activities have been increased.
Meanwhile the risks for the likes of Branson in the railway business have just dropped. Remember Mrs Blair “Isn’t there something we can do for Sir Richard, Tony”.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/putins-purge-of-his-top-generals/
What’s really going on?
Hang on……the world’s second largest army is being held by one a quarter of its size? A numerous and powerful country that straddles Europe and Asia, stuffed full of natural resources, Europe, India and China’s source of oil and gas is being defied, humiliated by a medium sized and impoverished new nation fighting on its own…….?
How can this be?
Napoleon Bonaparte, it is true, once said that ‘In war, moral power is to physical as three parts out of four’ but no-one really reads him (or, indeed, reads at all) these days.
But a recent article in The Spectator, written by Owen Matthews, a writer who has spent nearly three decades, on and off, reporting in Russia gives us a clue:
‘Corruption was a major factor in the army’s failure to seize and hold northern Ukraine in February and March 2022. Over the previous five years Shoigu was given vast resources – up to 6 per cent of Russia’s GDP – to build up and reform the Russian army into a (regionally, at least) invincible fighting force. Shoigu’s big innovation was the Battalion Tactical Group (BTG), a small and integrated force that combined motorised infantry and artillery.
The problem was that while hardware was not in short supply, soldiers were. But rather than admit failure to fulfil the Kremlin’s orders, generals solved the problem by simply reducing the strength of units. Motorised rifle battalions shrank from up to 539 personnel in 2017 to around 345 on the eve of the Ukraine invasion.
The estimated 120 BTGs that attacked Ukraine all went in at far from full combat strength. And that shortfall told, especially in the wooded countryside and city suburbs of Ukraine. Each infantry fighting vehicle needed a commander, a driver and a gunner, leaving four men to dismount and act as actual boots – and, more importantly, eyes, ears and rifles – on the ground.
Without conscripts, each platoon was left with perhaps two fighting infantrymen per vehicle. Ukrainian forces reported attacking Russian armoured vehicles manned by their three-man crew alone. ‘With no dismountable men you’ve got a motorised infantry unit that doesn’t have infantry,’ said a senior British military source I interviewed in Kyiv in spring 2022. ‘Everyone’s stuck in their vehicles. You’re not going to have situational awareness. You don’t have the numbers to do common infantry tasks like stacking up [advancing to contact in single file], clearing buildings or providing security for an element.’
Corruption has continued to plague the Russian army as the war grinds on…..’
It’s Blackadder without the humour; Russian Officers leaping out of their vehicles into the assault, looking behind them and there is no-one following.
As the redoubtable Lord Ian Botham might have said:
‘They forgot the soldiers!’
As ever, I find myself asking what is the point of your posts? OK we get it Putin’s bid for the Sisters of Mercy humanitarian of the year award is not going so well, Russia is not the Garden of Eden run by Francis of Assisi. You talk of corruption as if corruption is unknown in Ukraine and the western world!
In my book they are all corrupt, Ukraine, Nato/USA and Russia and the only course of action of any benefit to the ordinary people of the UK is to end this war as soon as we can on the best terms we can manage to negotiate.
And there’s the rub, this war is not being fought for the benefit of the ordinary folk of the UK or anywhere else, it seems to me it is a war of corrupt money and power politics played by megalomaniac power politicians on all sides for their own benefit at the cost of countless lives lost in the needless slaughter and ludicrous amounts of our money poured into the corruption machine.
The news round up on here is: ‘A summary of the most interesting stories in the past 24 hours that challenge the prevailing orthodoxy’
The Daily Sceptic encourages its subscribers to promote other stories challenging the prevailing orthodoxy that are not mentioned in the round up. The DS clearly cannot cover everything.
Regarding Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the prevailing orthodoxy on here, as represented by most commentators, can loosely be described as the RT (Russia Today) stance:
‘The inevitability of the denazification of Ukraine’
Putin’s invasion is framed so: ‘Ukraine, as history has shown, is impossible as a nation state, and attempts to “build” one naturally lead to Nazism. Ukrainism is an artificial anti-Russian construction that does not have its own civilizational content, a subordinate element of an alien and alien civilization……therefore the denazification of Ukraine is also its inevitable de-Europeanization.’
Including the sinister: ‘Nazi Ukraine will be eradicated, but including, and above all, Western totalitarianism……’
There is another, far more widely held, view outside the confines of DS commentators:
Documentary evidence from the Kremlin indicates that Putin’s real war aim is to establish a ‘Union State’ comprising Belarus (accomplished), Ukraine (partially accomplished), Moldova (under way) and the Baltic States (just started, at sea, the other day. This is because he was brought up with a vision that many people in Russia still adhere to – a vision of the Russian state as an empire that has to expand, and expansion is how you judge leaders. He will stop at nothing to achieve his adventurist ambitions
Russian authorities have committed war crimes in Ukraine and that some of their actions may amount to crimes against humanity.
These crimes include attacks on civilian infrastructure, wilful killings of civilians, torture, sexual violence, and forced deportations of children.
Rape is part of Russia’s military strategy and a “deliberate tactic to dehumanize the victims.”
Mass graves containing the bodies of hundreds of victims were discovered in several regions of Ukraine following the retreat of Russian troops.
Filtration centres were identified in Mariupol and Kharkiv, where civilians were detained by Russian authorities, and confessions of cooperation with Ukraine were extracted by torture.
Putin is most certainly not the legitimate head of Russia.
The presidential election in Russia was a non-democratic process that did not conform to international standards.
Flaws included a biased and exclusionary nomination procedure, abuses of public resources in favour of Vladimir Putin’s candidacy, extremely unbalanced media coverage, a lack of public discussion of policy issues, and a lack of guarantees of secrecy in electronic voting.
The point of my posts on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is, therefore, to represent the views of so many to the tiny minority of RT fans who populate these comments sections by providing some balance, illumination.
Whether the West is corrupt or not offers no justification whatsoever for Putin’s actions, obviously, because he is the aggressor. The RT view that it is all the fault of ‘NATO expansion’ does not survive the most cursory examination; silly.
And Putin’s stated aim of cutting off the Baltic States will mean an invasion of Poland, war with Britain.
That bears endless repetition so I make no apology whatsoever for endlessly repeating it since it concerns the welfare of every man, woman and child in these islands.
Speaking for myself, I never read RT and I have deleted the official Russian military channel from my Telegram. i don’t comb the news for obscure titles that tell the story the way I want to hear it, I listen to people whose information shows over time to be reasonably accurate, which is why Western press features rarely and Ukrainian sources never. The latter are confined to my fiction section.
See previous comment, then select your favourite can opener
Fancy a Pint
,
A well made observation. A cynic might say that a degree of corruption is normal around senior politicians, which might result in the current proceedings against Donald Trump backfiring later in the year – after all, he’s had a lot of free coverage for his campaign! Ordinary people might assume that they’ve all been up to something, just that some get caught, & some don’t.
What ever happened to all those soldiers that Ukraine had at the start. They outnumbered the Russians by a substantial margin.
You must remember Zelensky talking about his million man army when the Russians “invaded” with just 40,000.
And don’t you remember at the start of the
Winter SummerSpring offensive last year when all the Russians were going to run away and the victorious massed Ukrainian forces would sweep through to the Sea od Azov.Of course, sacking your most senior soldier Zaluzhny won’t help either, along with others including Nayev. It does wonders for morale does sacking a popular commander.
Morning Monro , is your moniker an anagram by chance or subtlety on purpose ? Your constant posting of all things Russian seems all consuming on your part , have you any other hobbies ?
And a very good morning to you.
Hope this finds you well.
Monro is a sept of Clan Munro.
Yes, plenty of other hobbies, thank you.
Most of what I post is, you will have noticed, sourced from experts on Russia, which I am not. This takes up very little of my time, authoritative sources now being so very easy to find, given the ability to read.
That is why it is so puzzling that very little in the way of authoritative or informed opinion comes back in the opposite direction; or not really.
No offence intended I just can’t help being comically ( hopefully ) facetious ,anyway beside Putin you must agree that there are surely are worse & equally just as dangerous Actors on the World stage at this time . Most supposedly on our side !
I am only interested in the security of this country.
Putin threatens that security.
That is why I will continue to draw the attention of all those who visit this site to that threat.
This is Tommy Robinson’s new documentary which he premiered in London yesterday: Lawfare: A Totalitarian State ( 1hr 30mins ).
It covers everything from the scamdemic response and death jabs, Ukraine war, up to the post-7th Oct hate marches and the two-tier policing that is evident now to all;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUGufiKTm6Q&ab_channel=UrbanScoop
The reason so many immigrants are employed is that they are willing to do the nasty, boring, mindless jobs that Brits can’t be bothered to do. These are unskilled jobs. How much training does that take?
Willing to do those jobs for the time being – then what !
For information they are 11 cases of Cohen invoices for claimed legal services, the correspronding ledger entry and the issuance of a business cheque signed by Trump in payment for those services, totalling 33 spearate charges. The final charge is the issuance of a personal cheque to Cohen from Trump’s personal account.
So the solar farm in India has been devastated, but has it been damaged?
The world is confusing these days, and I’m a bit confused by this:
Neil Young withdrew his music from Spotify in February 2022 and his former band members immediately followed him off Spotify:
‘“We support Neil and we agree with him that there is dangerous disinformation being aired on Spotify’s Joe Rogan podcast,” a statement signed by David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash posted Wednesday on Twitter said.’
However, according to an article in the NME in September 2023:
“Eric Clapton and Stephen Stills have helped raise millions of dollars for the Presidential campaign of controversial Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.”
It makes sense that Eric Clapton would support RFK, having suffered Covid vaccine damage, but Stephen Still – 20 months after supporting Neil Young’s boycott of Spotify due to ‘misinformation’ about Covid and vaccines, when RFK is also accused by the same type of people of spreading misinformation about Covid and vaccines?
But after the fundraiser for RFK, ‘The Daily Beast reported that Stills was still behind Biden to be president in a statement through a spokesperson.
“I support President Biden,” Stills said. “I was there as a guest to support Eric Clapton who performed.“’
It looks like Stephen Still is confused too!
Incidentally – which may or may not be relevant – David Crosby “died in his sleep after contracting Covid or the second time” in January 2023 at the age of 81.
Link to NME article:
https://www.nme.com/news/music/eric-clapton-and-stephen-stills-help-raise-millions-for-controversial-robert-f-kennedy-jr-s-presidential-campaign-3501810
Link to The Hill article:
https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/592523-crosby-and-stills-follow-nash-and-young-off-spotify/
Link to Fox News article:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/eric-clapton-raised-eye-popping-sum-rfk-jrs-presidential-campaign
It makes you wonder how thoroughly these celebrities think through the causes they support