How many people recognise the crisis on pensions which threatens their retirement?

The pensioners movement has been banging on about the poverty levels of the state pension for years but now the crisis has spread to private and vocational pensions.

Millions of pensioners can only live by submitting to the hated means test (which this Government promised to end).

The state pension is paid from the National Insurance Fund (not from income tax as many imagine), funded from the NI contributions that are deducted from your wages.

Contributions have recently been increased, bringing the Chancellor an extra £8billion per year.

It was not necessary to do this to give more to pensioners.

In fact it was in surplus, to the extent that the NIF was raided to fund the NHS.

In order to keep the promise not to increase income tax, both the war on Iraq and the NHS have been funded from the NIF.

As for private pensions, with interest rates and stock market dividends now low, pensions providers are drastically cutting their pay-outs.

More than half of employees' final salary pension schemes have been closed to new entries in order to protect directors' salaries and pensions.

-Roy Hathaway, chairman, Crawley Pensioners Action Group