Treasury and Work and Pensions

That is a very perceptive intervention. In a tit-for-tat response, Australia has now withdrawn its support. I have a constituent in the odd position of having lived here for some time and earned some pension, but who lived for 20 years in Australia and earned some pension there. He comes back to this country and finds that he will not receive his Australian pension because we started a tit-for-tat war with Commonwealth countries by denying pensioners the inflation uprating. If we have any morality or Labour principles, we should look after the people who paid into the national insurance system over a long lifetime of work in this country. I have done a lot of work on the Farepak scandal and I have been advised by a senior banker from the City. I have looked at the accounts of European Home Retail and many questions arise. I note that a senior Treasury Minister has said that he does not understand why people use savings clubs like Farepak. He would not say that if he had grown up in the urban community in which I did, which had something called a menoge—a corruption of the phrase ““ménage à vingt””—which was an arrangement between 20 people. My grandmother ran them. Poor people would put their money in trust to one person, and every 20 weeks they got a chance to spend it. That is how I got my school uniforms when I was younger. Those people did not trust banks and they did not feel that they would be able to go the month without spending the money on food for the family, but they had to have some form of saving for Christmas or other occasions—like the Farepak victims. People were used to trusting arrangements to which they paid their money without receiving interest. The menoges were collective, supportive clubs, and the savings clubs grew out of them.