Our useless leaders have just “stolen” £100,000 from me, probably from you and from millions of others – but nobody seems to have noticed

For over 30 years, I have paid National Insurance (NI) contributions. Like millions of others, I have paid these on the understanding that I would be entitled to a full state pension and that my wife would be entitled to 60% of the state pension because of my NI payments. I realise that there has not been any written contract between people paying NI and the Government. But the rules have remained pretty much the same for all my working life.

But our national debt is increasing by £3,800 per second £228,000 per minute, £13,000,000 per hour, £312,000,000 per day. Our leaders have two possible choices for dealing with our ever-increasing debt. They could cut spending – reduce the salaries and pensions of our greedy, thieving, incompetent bureaucrats, stop showering benefits on immigrants and the workshy and stop wasting £30bn a year on the EU and foreign aid. Or they could carry on spending and fund their financial incontinence by taking even more money from people who work and contribute. Our expenses-fiddling, overpaid, over-pensioned masters have decided to do the latter – carry on spending and wasting our money and take ever more from those who work and pay tax.

The latest government trick to take from working people has been to change the rules for the state pension. Up till now, if you or I paid full NI contributions and had a partner who had not, our partner would have been entitled to 60% of the state pension. If I understand what is happening, our leaders have just changed the rules so that people will only get a pension if they personally have paid NI. Now, my wife will get nothing even though I have paid full NI. That means my wife will lose an income in retirement of just over £3,000 a year. With annuity rates for an inflation-protected pension at a little above 3%, I will now have to pay £100,000 into my wife’s pension fund to give her the miserable £3,000 a year which the Government has just taken away from her.

Millions of other people will have been affected by this change in the same way as my wife. But nobody seems to have noticed and nobody has protested.

Of course, pension rules for those on public-sector, gold-plated pensions have not changed. So their partners will still be entitled to at least 60% of their massive pensions when they die. The title of my most recent book “GREED UNLIMITED How Cameron and Clegg protect the elites while squeezing the rest of us” pretty much describes what is happening in Britain today and why many of us (though not the elites) are going to be an awful lot poorer as a result.