Today's well-off pensioners threaten futures of those still in work

State pensions may be low in international comparisons, but our private pensions are high. Traditional final-salary pensions pay two-thirds of final salary, how much more is the state pension expected to top this up? Even current average salary schemes, like the NHS scheme, will pay out some 80% of career average salary by the time someone retires, 1/54th of their lifetime earnings each year adjusted at 1.5% growth above inflation. Add the state pension on top, and many workers will have a higher income in retirement than they had while working.

Obviously the state pension is a benefit, just like contribution-based Jobseekers Allowance is a benefit that people have paid for. Perhaps had past governments used the contributions more wisely than paying pensions to pensioners, the country would be wealthier. But who elected these past governments, that have spent the last 45 years flogging national assets? Difficult to blame the young for the privatisations and sell-offs that helped lower taxes while the current generation of pensioners were in work.

Of course the triple lock has redistributed income from working households to pensioners, as it guarantees that the state pension increases at least as fast as the wages earned by working households, even while the number of working households to support each pensioner is falling. This isn’t changed or contradicted by the fact that today’s pensioners were once workers. There remains a fundamental problem when 12% of pensioners live in poverty. But as long as pensioners as a group enjoy higher incomes than the population as a whole, this has to be seen as an inequality between pensioners. The huge risk is that the workers today simply won’t get to be the pensioners of tomorrow. To keep the state pension affordable, politicians increase the pension age. Perhaps it will be means-tested. The more valuable the state pension, the fewer of us current workers will be allowed to receive it at a time.

You publish regular articles celebrating the increase in the price of housing, when the same increases in the price of food, petrol or electricity would threaten to bring down the government. Instead of investing in companies that make stuff, a generation has invested in buying up all the houses so that they can extract as much rent as possible from the next generation. But there is a huge economic distortion here. A tenant pays tax on the income that they need to earn to pay their rent. To avoid distorting the tax system in favour of home owners over tenants, the owners of all property should pay an equivalent amount of tax based on the rental value. A proportional amount of the money raised could be used to increase the state pension, which would help lift the poorest pensioners out of poverty. Perhaps some of the other money raised could be used to lift the poorest children out of poverty too.

Alan Ritchie, Glasgow.

READ MORE: Get a grip: pensioners are not the enemy of the young

READ MORE: We have better things to spend money on than propping up Gaelic

READ MORE: Rural schools aren't the problem, CfE is

Insulting the gay struggle

CARLOS Alba uses the term "LGBT "in his account of the injustices meted out to both Alan Turing and Paul Wilson ("Our LGBT personnel need more than an apology", The Herald, July 24) when the correct description is homosexual men or gay men. This rewriting of history to retrofit actual, material injustices of the past on gay men to the recent LGBT ideology (or LGBT+, LGBTQ+, 2SLGBTQ+ ; the acronyms are as inconsistent as the ideology itself) is unbecoming of a daily newspaper whose concern should be the truth.

When these injustices took place, the term LGBT had not been conceived. Homosexuality and bisexuality (the LGB part of that acronym) is about same-sex attraction. Transgenderism, "Queer" (the outrageous appropriation of a slur hurled against homosexual people) and whatever the + means is about erasing the very concept of sex and therefore same-sex attraction and homosexuality itself. By conflating LGB with the T+ you are engaged in the force-teaming of gay, lesbian and bisexual people with groups whose aims are ideologically contested and antithetical to our lives and interests as homosexuals.

I am a gay man of 57 and remember and participated in the fight for equality for gay and lesbian people. In the 1990s, the tail end of the long period of injustice homosexual people faced, I was beaten near unto death by a gang of "queer-bashing" men, faced direct financial discrimination when applying for a mortgage and was subject to casual homophobia in higher education and the workplace. The gay rights movement that actually fought for and won equality that largely drew a line under that drew inspiration from both the women's and civil rights movements, it did not seek to occupy either and displace the people both were set up to fight for as TQ+ attempts to do to homosexuals. The fact that newspapers like yours rewrites and distorts our history to enable this is an insult to those generations of gay men and lesbians who fought and suffered for our rights. A struggle that emphatically did not involve the participation of trans people, "queers" (largely fetishistic straight people) and "non-binary" individuals.

Derek Bryce, Paisley.

Steven Camley's take on the revival of the works canteen (Image: Newsquest)

Get the Letter of the Day straight to your inbox.

Self-service with a difference

VICTORIA Masterson's report ("Return of the office canteen boosts profits for catering giant", The Herald, July 24) takes me back several decades to an incident which occurred when I used to work for the Health & Safety Executive, the UK government body which enforces workplace health and safety legislation.

A small group of us were visiting a factory which had agreed to take part in a data-gathering exercise. Since we were to be there for some days, the management said that we were welcome to use their canteen facilities, where the traditional dinner ladies had been replaced by a bank of state-of -the-art vending machines.

One break-time, I joined a small queue at one of these machines. The man in front of me inserted his cash, made his selection, then stood back and waited.

The machine emitted its usual whirring noises, but no cup appeared, and a stream of liquid splashed onto the perforated plate on the base of the serving hatch and gurgled away.

The worker turned to me. "My", he said, "that's what I call REAL automation - the effing thing even drinks it for you!"

Christopher W Ide, Waterfoot.