RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Labour's majority is built on sand

When Gordon Brown mounted his smash-and-grab raid on private pension funds, after Labour’s 1997 landslide, I dubbed him The Man Who Stole Your Old Age.

At a stroke, he torpedoed one of the world’s finest pension regimes and ensured that millions of people would find their expectations of a comfortable retirement income shot to pieces.

Naturally, however, such hardship wouldn’t apply to employees in the public sector – Labour’s core client base. Taxpayers would continue to bankroll their gold-plated, index-linked pensions.

So it comes as no surprise to learn that Gordon has been advising Labour’s latest Chancellor Martha Reeves on her upcoming Budget.

If the leaks are correct, Reeves plans to take Brown’s money-grabbing assault on private pension funds one step beyond by forcing employers to pay National Insurance on contributions.

The details need not detain us here and were explained superbly in Wednesday’s Mail by our Group Wealth and Finance Editor Jeff Prestridge.

But it will mean that, yet again, private sector employees will suffer a serious shortfall in the size of the pensions to which they rightly believed they were entitled. This being the Labour Party, though, public sector staff will be exempt, with taxpayers forced to pick up the tab.

Since 1997, public sector pay and pensions have eclipsed those in the private domain and the gap is on course to get even wider during the next five years.

As we have seen already since the election, Labour is determined to reward its union paymasters and all those Left-wing state employees who did so much to undermine the last Conservative government.

Inflation-busting wage rises have been awarded to train drivers and junior doctors. Aslef’s Mick Lynch and the teenage Trots who run the BMA these days made no secret of the fact their wave of strikes were aimed as much at bringing down the Tories as securing better pay and conditions.

Pro-Labour civil servants, whose naked politicking thwarted so many Conservative policies including tackling illegal immigration, can expect similar salary increases.

All this has to be paid for, which is why Reeves is planning to hammer the private sector in her Budget, on top of robbing pensioners of their £300 winter fuel allowance.

Labour seems to think the sole job of the productive sector of the economy is to create the wealth to keep those who work in the public sector in the style to which they have been accustomed.

The ‘Two-Tier’ Keir jibe doesn’t just apply to the criminal justice system, it is also true of the public/private divide.

Trade union power is out of all proportion to their representation in the total workforce. There are just 5.5 million members affiliated to the TUC, almost all of them working for central or local government and the NHS, compared to 27.2 million largely non-unionised staff who predominently work for small and medium sized businesses or are self-employed.

What if these forgotten millions, who generate the lion’s share of taxes, were to take a leaf out of the unions’ playbook and co-ordinate strikes until their own demands were met?

For instance, if farmers stop growing crops and raising livestock until they receive higher subsidies and the Government scraps plans to carpet our green-and-pleasant countryside with hideous wind farms and pylons. Supermarket shelves would be stripped in hours.

The Bog Roll Bandits would be banging on locked doors at Costo in pursuit of dwindling supplies of imported pasta.

Family-run corner shops close in protest at the police’s refusal to tackle the epidemic of robberies.

Hard-pressed, privately-owned pharmacies refuse to fill prescriptions over savage Government cuts to their annual grants, currently forcing hundreds out of business. The NHS’s already overwhelmed Third World A&E departments would implode as patients laid siege in search of medications.

Bank staff go on strike in protest against the latest pension fund grab. It would only be a matter of time before hole-in-the-wall machines emptied and electronic point-of-sale, tap-and-go card readers stopped working.

Pubs shut everywhere as landlords decide to join the strikes over booze tax rises, the ban on smoking in beer gardens and the ludicrous plan to make them spy on regulars who make ‘inappropriate’ comments about everything from illegal immigration to refusing to accept that a woman can have a penis.

Self-employed gas fitters, electricians and IT technicians down tools over punitive IR35 rules. BT Openreach staff join the pensions protests and the internet quickly collapses.

Elon Musk makes it clear that he will not come to the rescue as he switches off Starlink services to the UK over Labour interference in the U.S elections.

Car workers walk out and vow not to go back until the Government overturns the edict banning the sale and manufacture of petrol, diesel and hybrid vehicles by 2030 — an act of self-harm which will see hundreds of thousands of jobs lost in the British auto industry and hand the market for electric vehicles to cheap, subsidised Chinese imports.

Oil refinery and petrol station staff strike, demanding an end to Ed Miliband’s deranged Net Zero dash which will put them all out of work. Pumps run dry.

Bus drivers employed by private companies strike, along with black cab and Uber drivers, who join forces demanding that 20mph limits, cycle lanes and LTNs are scrapped immediately.

McDonald’s restaurants pull down the shutters and Amazon deliveries dry up as staff walk out over Labour’s ban on zero hours contracts, hitting vital supplies to civil servants ‘working from home’.

Chip shops close as fishermen tie up their boats in ports over reports that Starmer will hand back British waters to Brussels as part of his ‘reset’ of relations with the EU.

There are no newspapers, TV or radio, apart from the BBC, as staff strike demanding an end to tax rises and pensions cuts.

The CBI tells employers to stop collecting PAYE until the rise in NI contributions is abandoned and Ange Rayner’s neo-Communist ‘workers’ rights’ charter is binned. The Treasury’s receipts dry up in days, causing a run on the pound and no money to pay public sector wages.

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Oh, and pensioners strike, too, over the withdrawal of the winter fuel payment and the planned reduction in inheritance tax allowances. There’s no one to work in garden centres or DIY warehouses and no unpaid baby sitters for working mums, etc.

Remember, Labour’s majority is built on sand and the government only enjoys, if that’s the word, the support of 20 per cent of those eligible to vote. And even that paltry figure is shrinking fast.

There are far more of us than them. If the rest of us all downed tools, it would make the strikes by train drivers and junior doctors look like a teddy bear’s picnic. The country would go into complete meltdown.

How long would it be before Labour caved in and agreed to ‘get round the table’ and conceded every single demand because the cost of giving in was less than enduring a few days of a general strike in the private sector?

I’d give it a couple of days, maybe a week, tops.

Starmer couldn’t withstand an uprising by the secret people of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. He wouldn’t last another five minutes, let alone five years.

Martha Reeves would do well to remember that as she prepares the most divisive, vindictive, smash-and-grab raid Budget in decades.

She might care also to remember what happened, after he became Prime Minister, to her mentor, The Man Who Stole Your Old Age. The British people will have their revenge.