The government is not in favour of semantics, the science of signification or exact meaning: 'The prime minister's official spokesman dismissed the row. "People are getting caught up in a semantic debate," he said.'
The 'row' is about the goverment's proposals to change pension arrangements for public service workers so that they contribute more and receive less. Workers, including teachers, were yesterday on strike over this issue.
David Cameron claimed earlier this week that the system could "go broke" if it were not reformed. Yet a recent report by Lord Hutton, the former Labour work and pensions secretary who wrote the blueprint for the government's reforms, said that the cost of public sector pensions, as a proportion of GDP, was set to fall after peaking last year at 1.9% to 1.4% by 2059/60.
Faced with this piece of information, the Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, who is leading the negotiations with the public sector unions, was asked to justify earlier statements that pensions were becoming unaffordable. Maude would only say that the Hutton report, on which the pension plans are based, had "very clearly" said that the status quo was not tenable. "You cannot continue to have more and more people in retirement being supported by fewer and fewer people in work," he said.
Hutton's report would clearly seem to indicate that you can, but if Maude thinks otherwise he can alter the objectionable statistic only by denying some people pensions altogether, perhaps by a statutory selective cull at retirement age. A merely semantic ripost perhaps, but what is one left when politicians refuse to engage with logic?
Acknowledgement: The Jekyll and Hyde Dictionary has been of great assistance in the preparation of this post.
