Swindle of the age

Most successful swindles come with a bribe. Certainly the greatest swindle of modern times - the pensions racket of the late 1980s and early 1990s - could never have worked without a big bribe from the government. Soon after the big Tory victory in 1983, a gang of tightly knit Thatcherites, closely connected to the privately financed University of Buckingham and the banks, decided on a big push for private enterprise in the field of old age pensions. These men were offended by what they regarded as the "crypto-socialist" combination of state and occupational pension schemes. They campaigned for "portable pensions" - a dream world in which working people could go through life reinforced with their own personal pension bought individually with their own money to the profit of a bank or an insurance company.