Mark Andrews: Blair's brass neck on pensions, and why Zack Polanski should join the Specials

Mr P retweeted a post on X accusing officers of ‘repeatedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head’ when he was already incapacitated from being Tasered.

Now OK, this might warrant a yellow card in a football match, but the guy was holding a knife with which he had allegedly already attacked two men. And he didn’t look like he wanted to come quietly. Maybe Mr Polanski should sign up for the Specials - the constabulary, not the ska band - and show us how it’s done. But, of course, it’s much easier to be a keyboard warrior than a copper on the beat.

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One also wonders if Mr Polanski’s post has been somewhat counter-productive. Was I the only one who watched that video and privately thought to myself: “About time too. Now about those shoplifters and phone thieves...?”

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I don’t really blame Mr Polanski, he is a product of the age we live in: shallow, vacuous, believing everything on social media, disinterested in detail, and hearing what it wants to hear.

When he stood to be Green Party leader, his pitch was that he would be an ‘eco populist’, and he has delivered that in spades. He’s the master of targeting a relatively small but easy-to-convince demographic that will always place more emphasis on a 30-second soundbite on a Chinese video platform than a dry but well-thought out policy document that might actually solve some of the problems we face.

We get the politicians we deserve. And he is a prime example..

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Sir Tony Blair reckons the state pension was ‘built for another era’, and should be replaced by something ‘designed for how people live today. He sounds like that yuppie in the old Midland Bank advert who wanted a ‘new kind of bank account for a new kind of customer’.

Presumably he means ‘cheaper’. In the same way that he made the university funding system more funky and modern, scrapping those boring, old-fashioned grants and introducing tuition fees. For which, I’m sure, millions of ex-students now up to their eyeballs in debt will be forever grateful.

Of course, he raises a fair point in that as people live longer, there will come a time when taxpayers can no longer afford to fund the growing number of retirees. This column has long advocated linking the retirement age to life expectancy, in the same way that the pension itself is linked to inflation.

But Blair has form when it comes to pensions. Back in 1997, to raise cash for his spending plans without people noticing, his Government introduced a tax on dividends in pension funds. This led to millions of private sector workers - myself included - seeing our defined benefit pensions closed, and replaced with inferior defined contribution ones. Surprisingly, MPs were unaffected by this.

Pensions are in need of reform, no doubt about that. But it’s probably best the proposals don’t come from a multi-millionaire septuagenarian who has been in receipt of his own copper-bottomed, gold-plated defined-benefit parliamentary pension for many years - a privilege he has denied to millions of others.