Northern Dims

Daveybloke, whose Cuddly Coalition has done so much to unite Britain against itself, has had a bit of a burble about the "pensions apartheid" which may result unless public-sector employees are treated with appropriate contempt. People in the private sector, where they do everything right, "have this flexible ethic, they go on working, they change the way they work"; in the public sector, of course, flexible ethics are as rare as non-deniable benefits claims, while going on working belongs solely in strange dreams of other days. This is because "in the public sector, we have quite a cut-off and a very expensive public sector pensions system"; from which it follows, as bonus follows balls-up, that pensions apartheid is a Very Bad Thing, despite the assiduous support of Daveybloke's spiritual godmother for the racial variety.

The occasion of Daveybloke's burble was a visit to the Northern Future Forum, a gathering of governments from eight Nordic and Baltic countries and the mainland. Wee Nicky was apparently left at home, doubtless trusting Daveybloke not to veto the North Sea and just a teeny bit disappointed at missing the chance to stop off in Norway and pay his respects at Quisling's grave. Daveybloke had a bit of a gush about the Norwegian pension system, which allows people to choose their retirement age and pays more to those who wait longest. In Britain this would no doubt translate into a system under which those who could not afford to retire early would be vilified for keeping younger people from being worked to death in their place. Naturally, the system for gearing tens of millions of individual pensions to tens of millions of individual retirement ages would be privatised, making the transition a paragon of fairness and simplicity; and naturally, the IT side of things would all be sorted out in a jiffy. Our department of work and pensions is, after all, run by the brilliant Iain Duncan Smith.

As an afterthought, Daveybloke had a bit of a burble about women in the boardroom. This is not just about equality, but also about effectiveness. Heaven forfend that Daveybloke should consider equality between the sexes as an end in itself; and in any case, Daveybloke and his cuddly chums have just discovered that the lack of women in boardrooms is the latest thing to be holding back Britain's economic recovery, before the snow's turn comes up again next month.