Workers made to take the hit

Whatever the legal flim-flam handed down by the court, no-one doubts that the government assault on public-service pensions is about making workers pay for the capitalist crisis.

The judges accepted George Osborne's case that CPI, which is around 1.2 per cent lower on average than RPI by virtue of excluding housing and other costs, was the more appropriate measure.

Appropriate for whom and for what underlying purpose?

If the purpose is to estimate the effect of inflation on workers' living costs, how appropriate is it to disregard housing - a major part of working people's expenditure?

However, if there is consensus that the government should force the working class to take the hit for state subsidies to pay for an uncontrolled finance sector's unmanageable debts, then appropriate is as appropriate does.

However, this court decision sheds new light on the spurious statement by David Cameron that "we're all in this together."

If that were so, how is it that MPs remain on a pension scheme that, even with recent tweaking, most public-service workers would give their eyeteeth to be part of.

How come Court of Appeal judges, paid £196,707 a year and entitled to claim a non-contributory pension of 50 per cent after 20 years, feel justified in kicking into touch the public-service workers' reasonable case?

Britain's judges have actually set up a fighting fund with a view to getting lawyers to take a case to the European Court of Human Rights to seek a ruling that government plans to force them to make a contribution to their pensions are flawed.

Their case is that the priority of preserving their independence from political control demands that government must not reduce their income.

In contrast, of course, firefighters, civil servants, prison officers, teachers, local authority workers and others can all have their take-home pay slashed and the value of their pensions reduced with impunity because they are the little people who bear the burden of taxation that their wealthy betters disdain.

The court decision emphasises once more that the courts are rarely inclined to deliver a victory to working people that their industrial strength cannot guarantee.

It will encourage the government to press ahead with its agenda of public service cuts and privatisation for the next three unless mass opposition, including generalised strike action, succeeds in defeating it.

Freeloading family

What a festival of obsequious grovelling our MPs displayed, trooping dutifully into the House of Lords to be lectured by our unelected, hereditary head of state.

This exercise in banality must have been mind-numbing for those who sat through it, but even in black and white her words have a deathly ring.

"During these years as your Queen, the support of my family has, across the generations, been beyond measure," she said, reminding us of the multimillion-pound bill that we all pay to support her and her family.

But the financial cost of this parasitic excrescence atop British society is not the worst of it.

Isn't it time to give democracy a try instead of hanging onto the outdated practice of disqualifying everyone bar Windsor family members from serving as head of state?