Andy gets excited - but the cupboard is bare

My friend Andy Owen is an excellent copywriter and speaker.

One reason he is good is that he gets excited - he cares.

Here's something he just sent me.

"A political consensus was reached by the EU Nations at the Laeken Summit
in 2001, that each member state would attempt to attain a basic pension of
40% of its average wage by 2007 and then work towards 60%.

The UK's basic pension is 17% of the national average wage. Staggeringly,
most European pensioners receive a basic pension of at least 60% of their
country's average wage.

The UK provides the worst basic pension by far.

Only Estonia (33%), Ireland (31%), Holland (30%) and the UK (17%) pay a
basic pension of under 40% of average wage.

In fact, taking the pension as a percentage of each country's average wage,
you will note that pensioners in Greece, Luxembourg, Spain and Italy receive
over 5 times our basic pension.

Those in Portugal, Malta, Hungary and France receive over 4 times as much
and those in Poland, Czech Republic, Latvia, Finland and Sweden receive
3 times as much.

Slovakia, Cyprus, Denmark, Germany, Lithuania and Belgium receive over double. Whilst finally, Estonia Ireland and Holland have almost twice our basic pension.

If you ask me, it's a bloody disgrace...

Let's tell these buffoons in government what skinflints we feel they are.

They are quite simply laughing at us - the very people that have contributed all
their working lives. And they are doing it to such an extent, that we all get a
basic pension that is much less than people in poorer countries throughout Europe are getting.

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/pensionpo...cd8cf0e.001e1c"


Now you - if you are British - may ask why we are getting less.

The answer is twofold.

1. An incompetent government which has managed with surefooted skill to focus on all the wrong things at the expense of the right ones.

2. All European countries have aging populations and most of them are going to find it increasingly hard, if not impossible, to fund those pensions.

One of the few, the very,very few, things successive British governments did get right in the last 50 years was to set aside enough money to fund pensions. Or such was the case until the Great Bliar and Can't Count Brown, the Acclaimed (by the experts but nobody living in the real world) Financial Genius took over.

Now all that carefully set aside money - and hundreds of billions more has been pissed away on hiring nearly a million public service drones, foolish and tragic foreign entanglements, diversity training, failed attempts to improve hospitals, schools and other assorted bollocks.

Who says you can't get the worst of both worlds? Only someone who hasn't been in this country for the last four decades.