LONDON: Former British prime minister Gordon Brown warned Scots yesterday of a pensions “time bomb” in their ageing population as he joins a fight to dissuade them from voting to leave the United Kingdom.
Brown, a Scot, was making his first speech in support of the cross-party Better Together campaign, warning Scots of a possible deficit in pension funds if they opt out of the 307-year old union in a September 18 referendum.
Polls show the campaign against independence still in the lead but the Yes campaign has sustained a rally in support that it won last year, narrowing the gap significantly. Brown, a former Labour leader, has kept a low profile since losing the 2010 general election and after being ranked as one of the most unpopular prime ministers of modern times.
But he has respect in Scotland, where Labour was the major party until beaten by the Scottish National Party (SNP) in 2007. He used new figures to argue pensioners will benefit from being in a UK-wide scheme. “The bills for pensions mount because of a pensioners’ time-bomb as Scottish pensioner numbers rise by 300,000 even as Scotland’s working age population grows more slowly than that of the UK,” he said, estimating the number of Scottish pensioners will rise to 1.3 million.
“Pensioners are better protected when the risks are spread across the UK and it is also clear that in the year the SNP want independence, the Scots pension bill alone is three times the income from oil revenues,” he will tell an audience at Glasgow University, according to extracts released in advance. The SNP, whose popularity has surged in the past decade under the leadership of Alex Salmond, says independence would let Scotland make better use of its oil wealth rather than having often unpopular policies imposed by lawmakers in London.
Reuters
