RECENT correspondents on pensions (Letters, May 27 and June 11), while vigorously defending their own political party's current position on state-funded pensions, seem to have forgotten where the debate started from.

This is extraordinary considering that this correspondence is in a local newspaper and that it was the Labour MP for Blackburn, Barbara Castle, who piloted through the last Labour government's pension Act.

Had it remained intact, it would have secured for pensioners a respectable place in the European league of pensions. Eighteen years of Tory rule ensured that did not happen.

The removal of the link between wages and pensions has left more than a £20 a week loss to pensioners on the basic pension. The earnings-related element has been seriously eroded. UK pensioners are left stranded, adrift of any of their European counterparts.

It should also be noted that the Barbara Castle pension legislation also ensured that occupational pensions could not pay any less than the state-funded pension - another important provision removed by Thatcher's government and continued by this government.

In the fourth-richest nation in the world that has been spending £42 million a day to pursue a war, it simply is not good enough to allow second-rate pension schemes to be paid to pensioners who lived through or fought in a war that cost more than 50 million lives.

It is nothing less than a betrayal to expect those same pensioners to have their meagre pension topped up under the same principle, dressed up as a new and modern policy.

COUNCILLOR DON RISHTON, Livesey Branch Road, Blackburn.

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