BeeHive > Press Articles > Honesty's the best policy
Honesty's the best policy
I’m not being funny, but we’ve got loads of pensions legislation already - cupboards full of it in fact. More than most people have tea towels, I should imagine. To be honest, pensions legislation is a bit of an unimaginative Christmas present really - we’ve had five new pieces of pensions legislation in just the last two-and-a-half years, enough for three Christmases and two birthdays.
It’s getting a bit like the jumpers our aunts kept knitting for us when we were young. Every Christmas, another jumper, every birthday, another jumper. You end up with a cupboard full of jumpers that you never wear because they don’t fit - and never could, what with one arm being miles longer than the other. And even if they did fit you’d still never wear them because they were made from the kind of remaindered wool that made you stand out from the crowd and look very, very silly.
I’m really worried that this new piece of pensions legislation won’t fit either - just like the last lot we got - and will just end up forgotten in the cupboard with the rest. The trouble is, pensions legislation is a bit more important than jumpers. You could happily leave a jumper gathering dust at the back of your wardrobe and just get it out and wear it with the sleeve rolled up on the odd occasion when your aunt actually came round, so you could pretend you wore it all the time. This is a valid response to unwanted jumper syndrome.
But, unwanted pensions legislation syndrome isn’t quite the same sort of thing at all - oh no. Whether we like it or not we’ve got to wear it. Even if it doesn’t fit us or suit us, we’ve got no choice. It’s all we’re going to get and we have to lump it. We should be grateful we’ve got pensions legislation, it’s rude to complain. Plenty of people in the world would love to have the pensions legislation we have in our wardrobes, we’re really spoilt and ungrateful.
Yes, all the same arguments your parents threw at you for not wearing the jumpers auntie slaved over for so long, and all designed to make you feel bad about yourself - along with all the guilt that accompanied feeling personally responsible for African famines because you didn’t eat your greens. I’ve never really bought into any of those arguments and still think it would have been better for everybody concerned if I’d given the jumpers back and said I didn’t really like them and they didn’t fit anyway.
We didn’t do that, of course, and that’s why our cupboards got so full of jumpers and why the charity shops have done so well now we’ve all grown up and finally cleared out our lofts. But, as we’ve all grown up now, perhaps it’s time we started acting a bit more sensibly with regard to this unwanted pile of pensions legislation that is cluttering up the place.
When we get this new Christmas present from the Government, if we don’t like it, or it doesn’t fit with our real lives, or it doesn’t suit our individual circumstances, we should tell them we don’t want it. That’d make them think a bit. Wouldn’t it be marvellous if we all wrote to our MPs and said we really think they could have tried harder, Christmas present wise, and have given us something useful for a change?
If just two people in the whole country did that, they’d probably just think they were weirdoes and ignore them. But, as Arlo Guthrie once said, what if thousands of people did it? They’d think it was a movement. And that’s what it is, it’s the anti-unwanted jumper and pension movement. All you’ve got to do to join is promise yourself to keep up to speed with all this new pension stuff when it comes out and if you don’t like the look of it, write to your MP and tell them so. Tell them you wish you’d told your aunt a few home truths too. That should give them something to think about.
Steve Bee
First published in Bloomberg Money, December 2002
