Another week passes and along comes another bunch of speculation about how we’re going to solve the pensions ‘black hole’.
The pensions crisis is one of the great tragedies of our age. However, it’s not a particularly well-marketed topic, and this is one of the main reasons why so few people are actually taking the time to pay into their retirement funds.
It’s just not a sexy enough topic for a decent tragedy. You wouldn’t put money on Shakespeare penning one of his masterpieces on the subject, would you?
Imagine Hamlet rewritten for this modern tragedy. You’d have to have Gordius, the evil minister/king who had killed off the company’s final salary schemes by removing tax credits, much to the disgust of Hamfisted, the HR director/good prince.
Sadly, Hamfisted isn’t much of a man of action, and instead is much more worried about getting a seat at the top table for the feast in the castle.
There’d be some skulduggery – no doubt including a witch-hunt where someone gets burned at the stakeholder pension – and the heroine would sadly drown (in a sea of paperwork).
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In the end, all would be well when Ballsofbras, the pensions regulator, came in with his army of civil servants to take over the kingdom and restore peace and prosperity to the pension fund.
Unfortunately, the audience may have difficulty suspending disbelief after seeing the whole thing sorted out in a couple of hours rather than many interminable years of political wrangling.
