Have the pension-meddlers no shame?

GORDON Brown may be feeling slightly queasy this weekend after the declaration by his boss that he intends to 'go on and on' despite the odd palpitation. But Brown should be feeling sick to the very pit of his stomach over last week's revelations about his and this Government's mishandling of the pensions meltdown. That really will go on and on.

First, the new Pensions Minister Alan Johnson waffled on to the Labour Party Conference about a pensions crisis as though it were years away.

He hinted, however, that the Government - so long as it is safely installed for a third term - might contemplate a degree of compulsion in savings.

Anyone with half a brain can see that the basic state pension is inadequate, means-tested benefits are a disincentive to save and that company pensions are being eroded. Compulsion in one form or another is inevitable.

Tony Blair appeared to signal a redesign of the basic state pension a couple of days later, but not before an influential survey had revealed that most small and medium-sized companies actively discourage employees from joining a pension scheme.

Adair Turner, the former CBI boss looking into the issue for Blair, damned successive governments for failing to look forward far enough to solve what he described as a 'current crisis'.

By now we are all familiar with Brown's £5bn a year raid on the pensions sector, but then at the end of the week it emerged that the famously inept Office for National Statistics had been wrongly counting the amount of money paid into pension funds in the first place - a suspicion first raised by Opposition spokesman David Willetts two years ago.

The Government Actuaries Department has also consistently underestimated how long we are all likely to live.

Ridiculously, Turner will have to delay his report into what's gone wrong because he has been unable to get reliable figures. And finally, Sir Peter Davis, also looking into pensions for the Government, announced that employees had been hard done by.

Employers, he said, had taken pensions holidays and treated workers badly. This, remember, from the man who was ousted recently from the top job at Sainsbury with a magnificent pay-off and pension and who presided over the closure of the supermarket group's final salary pension scheme. What a ghastly muddle. With people like this in charge, most of us will be desperate to work until we're 70.

Most shareholders should know that the value of their investments can go down as well as up. Their worth can, as was the case for holders of shares in Marconi and others, sometimes be obliterated. What investors in British Energy are now finding out is that things can get even worse.

Having already lost almost all their money in one of the last Tory privatisations, they now stand to lose the rest of their wealth, even their houses, if they dare to vote against the planned bail-out of the company.

Opposing the restructuring apparently contravenes Company Law because it could 'induce a breach of contract'. The 'contract' involved is one whereby the Government will inject £650m and take on British Energy's nuclear liabilities, and bondholders get 97% of the company in return for not calling in their debt.

Shareholders have not been given the opportunity to vote on this 'contract'. But if they now vote against a deal that will leave them with a mere 2.5% of the group, they could be sued.

The fact that investors can potentially face unlimited liability by exercising their right to vote is appalling.

These are not wealthy Lloyd's Names who are refusing to pay their debts. These are mainly ordinary people who should be the lifeblood of a functioning shareholder democracy.

It is an outside bet that bondholders would pursue small shareholders for their modest assets.

But the very possibility undermines the basis on which most people hold shares. And it does nothing for the standing of Britain as a leading financial centre where shareholders' rights are protected.