Government pensions grab impoverishes miners

Then: fighting the government for their jobs.

Now:  fighting the government for their pensions.

This is a scandal that has largely slipped by unnoticed: the massive profits our government has made over decades by creaming huge sums of money from British miners' pension schemes.

Ministers took £617 million from the miners’ pension fund in 2018 to top up Treasury coffers, bringing the total removed to more than £4.4 billion in 24 years. The scandal has left retired pit workers receiving disgracefully low payouts averaging £84 a week, with at least 6,000 having had their pensions cut. Successive governments have mined the rich seam of funds since 1994. The Tories have pocketed two payments of £51 million in the last two years alone and have never put a penny back. Energy Minister Claire Perry recently revealed that the government will purloin another £427 million over the next three years.

Six months ago, Labour MP Dennis Skinner raised the matter in parliament at Prime Minister's Questions: "Is the minister aware that already his government have taken more than three and a half billion pounds out of the miners' pension? They're like Philip Green and Maxwell put together. Stop stealing the miners' pension."

Gloria De Piero, Labour MP for Ashfield, wrote in The Mirror last September: "It seems like daylight robbery to many. While many MPS [Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme] pensioners struggle to get by, the Government is profiting to the tune of billions of pounds from the investments of miners’ pension contributions. This is quite simply, grossly unfair, and it really is time the government did the decent thing and started talks to renegotiate the surplus sharing arrangement."

Considered alongside the WASPI scandal, it is clear that the government regards the pensions of ordinary people as a resource to be plundered at will without any concern for either the injustice of depriving people what they have worked for all their lives or the indignity of needless poverty in retirement.

Details of how the rip-off came about can be found at WalesOnLine, and an on-line petition has been set up to demand that this injustice be stopped. You can sign it here.