As unions representing 400,000 workers are forced to take strike action in defence of their pensions, it emerges that John Hutton, the former New Labour minister who helped the Tory-led coalition attack their pensions, is to be paid £1,000 per day to chair the new “mutualised” pensions company that will run the civil service pension scheme. As Mark Serwotks put it, “his huge pay packet is an insult to the millions of workers whose pensions he has helped to cut.”
Lord Hutton will be paid a higher rate than the Prime Minister himself to run the pension scheme of the six million civil servants and their families whose livelihoods he’s helped slash. You couldn’t make it up.
It’s bad enough that the Government has repeatedly misrepresented (civil servicese for ‘lied’) the facts about public sector pensions. Cameron, Maude & co. have claimed the cost is expected to soar; their chosen stooge, Lord Hutton, nailed that one when he noted in his report that payments will “fall gradually to around 1.4% of GDP in 2060 after peaking at 1.9% in 2010-11″. They claimed public sector pensions were ‘gold-plated’ when the average local government pension is just £80 a week. They proclaim the injustice of low-paid private sector workers having to subsidise public sector pensions when in fact what they’re really subsidising are the enormous pensions and huge tax reliefs of the private sector business elite. Even if the Government were true, their role shouldn’t be to level down to the worst pensions in the country (a race to the bottom), but to lever up the lowest private sector pensions to at least a minimum decent standard. 
I never thought I’d say but it but, Christ, I don’t half know how Thatcher felt. Until her administration came and put the ‘Great’ back into ‘Great Britain’ (and all that), post-war Britain was a picture of despair for Maggie. The Tories had capitulated to the political settlement established by Clement Attlee’s 1945 government, with just a few tweaks. Post-war politics were a “socialist ratchet”, she claimed: “Labour moved Britain towards more statism; the Tories stood pat; and the next Labour Government moved the country a little further left. The Tories loosened the corset of socialism; they never removed it.” 
As economists we are opposed to the public sector pension reforms proposed by this government and Lord Hutton.
Today, a report commissioned by one of the most radical right-wing governments in modern British history 