Pensions

There's loads more guff about, on the 'pensions' issue, because the UK government releases its much leaked Pensions White Paper today.

I'm 34, any changes made in pension rules now are pretty academic to me as, no doubt, everything will have been mucked about with and changed again before I ever "retire".

The concept of retirement is dead in the water, and we should all accept that now and start living our lives how we want to in the present. No more slaving away looking for some liberation point at age 65 or 67 or 70. Tom Hodgkinson typically hit the ball on the head in his Idle Thoughts column in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago.

Don't buy into the whole private pension nonsense that we're being co-opted into either. This is just ploughing more money into the stockmarket and contributing to all the global ills that corporations beholden to short-term returns are visiting on the poor and the environment. And anyway if the demographic situation for the UK is bad for state pensions, who is supposed to be buying all the shares that the ageing population will want to sell to buy annuities with?

It's all smoke and mirrors, invest in yourself, your family and your community. And grow (at least some of!) your own food.

Jonathan Dawson, the secretary of GEN-Europe and sustainability educator at the Findhorn Foundation is one of an increasing number of people thinking about new and effective solutions to providing for ourselves in 'old age'. In a recent article published both in the latest Resurgence, and the previous Permaculture Magazine he make suggestions for what he calls Sustainability Pension Funds. It is ideas like these and those of the New Economics Foundation proposed in the document People's Pensions: New Thinking for the 21st Century that should really be on the political agenda.