I'm sitting here this morning basking in the warm glow that I get when I know that my government loves me. 

In fact my government loves me soooooooo much that they want to make sure I'm alright in my old age by making me work longer before I can retire.  Not for me a leisurely knocking off at 60, nor even 65 (as the initial rumour went).  I can look forward to punching my time clock until the ripe old age of 67, although, given that I'm only 37, there's a good chance that the retirement age will go up again before I get there. 

It's alright though because the government (a labour government mind) has told me that not only is this for my own good but that, according to their studies, I want to keeping working - right up until I die. 

There is a good reason behind this of course; the government pot is just not large enough to pay a suitable pension to the growing population.  Therefore the only option is to make people work for longer and tell them to save more (how exactly is not explained).  It hasn't been an easy decision for the government to make and to give them their due they have made every effort to address the pension shortfall.  The first thing they did was to reduce their own overblown pension funds, recognising that they didn't really need a pension four times the average working wage of the public or free travel for life.  They also upped their own retirement age; they can now expect to deliver after dinner speeches, at a hundred quid a pop, until well into their 60's.  And really if they can make the effort to top their pensions up this way I don't see why we can't. 

The government also took a good long look at its spending and decided that unfortunately the budget was just to tight to put any more money into the retirement pot.  Not that they didn't try you understand. First they thought about taking some of the excess money that they pile into education, education, education; unfortunately even Gordon Brown had to admit that if they were to reduce the per head funding to less than the 5p they currently spend it might have a knock on effect on the country's future.  Similarly they couldn't ban the TV license fee or the BBC might not be able to afford to keep running their wide selection of repeats, thus depriving future generations of valuable history lessons.  

The possibility of using some of the funds raised from speed cameras, congestion charges and fuel tax were discussed but it was felt that these were better used to fund more speed cameras, congestion areas and fuel taxes.  After all if the population were expected to work longer they would need to stay fit and ensuring that nobody could afford to own a car would allow them to get plenty of exercise walking to work.  For the same reason it was decided to cut funding to public transport so as not to encourage slothful train and bus use.  A similar keep fit incentive was encouraged by closing all the local banks and post offices forcing people to travel 10 miles to get their money out for free, or pay for the privilege of doing so at a local cash machine.   While this brought in an additional £60m a year this money could not be used for pensions as it wouldn't be right to give people their own money back.  That would just lead to anarchy.

In desperation the government looked to their defense budget.  Much thought was given to the necessity of keeping troops stationed all over the shop, but a quick chat, and a bit of a snog, with Bush soon convinced them of their moral right to save the world.  Perhaps if they cut down on the quality of gear supplied to the troops?  But then given that the soldiers were already paying for their own boots and desert kit this didn't seem practical. 

So then, there was just nowhere that the money could be found, perhaps the best thing would be for the government to spend a few million pounds on a campaign to encourage people to save more.  As an added incentive the government made plans to crack down on company directors who absconded with people pension funds.  Of course their power to address this problem was limited (they are, after all, only the government) but they did agree that it was very wrong that people could save diligently all their lives, only to have their money taken away when the company folded.  Of course the government couldn't make any changes to the law to ensure that people's savings were protected, or that if a company went bankrupt they first paid out to the little people instead of to the managing directors.  What they could do was ensure that the next time a pension company folded and the directors took the money and retired to live on a private island in the sun somewhere, that Tony Blair would be straight around to give them a damn good telling off ( and maybe ask for a small campaign donation since he was there).

Given that it is so obvious that the government cares for my best interests, why do you suppose it is that I am beginning to feel like Boxer the horse in Animal Farm?