Airline offers a taste of pension pain to come

The Aer Lingus pension dispute is but a foretaste of things to come.

Early last week, a peer of the realm in Britain called for “financial penalties for pensioners who were not contributing to society so that they could avoid being a burden on the state”.

He was speaking to a parliamentary committee investigating the impact of the ageing population. He exacerbated the situation by effectively comparing pensioners to job-shy unemployed: “We are now prepared to say to people: ‘If you do not look for work you don’t get benefits, so if you are old and you are not contributing in some way or another maybe there is some penalty attached to that.’ ”