Originally Posted by
Jabba_TG12
The services always managed to fill your spare time with bollocks. It was and probably still is an occupational hazard. What was the old saying "if you cant take a joke, you shouldnt have joined"?
Aux and Reserves are all well and good at a local/station level during normal peacetime. Soon as the stretch starts to come though, there'll only be the one source to pick up that demand and it wont be from the Aux or Reserves. Plus, as we all know from our times in the service, what starts out as a stop gap often becomes the established norm because it papers over fundamental cracks and kicks the can further down the road until some other sap with scrambled egg on his hat becomes responsible for it, especially out of his budget, as opposed to the incumbent who dreamed it up while on his way to £300 a day in the HoL, membership of Common Purpose and "retiring" on full pay. If you can afford to source, hire, keep and pay reserves, you can afford to hire, train and develop regulars as well.
There is only one way in this life of enjoying a career devoid of somebody elses "bollocks", however you define that - and that is to work for yourself as opposed to working for HMG or for someone elses company. Dont appreciate your spare time being filled up with bollocks - dont join up.
And as for pensions... final salary schemes were all well and good when we didnt live so damned long and when the population wasn't as big as it is now. Private schemes were nuked by Brown and Robinson in 1997 and have never recovered since; no one has the guts to confront the pachyderms in the room of migration, stifled wage inflation due to labour market over supply, a lower tax take as a result and the unwillingness to modernise the tax code to adapt to the vagaries of globalised businesses. Its just yet another can to be kicked down the road.
Those who contributed to those final salary schemes back in the day did so honestly, after having been told that if they paid for a lifetime into it that they would get what was promised at the end of it, when it was their time to retire. They just did as they were told, and did not reasonably expect to get continuously dicked for the bill for it once they'd retired. Especially when those who can contribute more, but do not because they're not the easy targets, particularly global corporate entities, get away with murder by comparison, compared to the self employed and those hoovered up by IR35 or underpriced by cheap labour from overseas.
Then again, no one bothered voting for anything else but more of the same. And the one thing they all promised you is that they'd spend more money indulging your every whim from cradle to grave so you dont have to. Which, you all naturally thought, would either come for free or that some other nameless sap would get jacked to pay for it, while it employs legions of CBA's who do the bare minimum of delivering a service not to get fired while extracting every single personal, professional and financial benefit that they can for themselves. We often get what we voted for and then moan about it afterwards. Its the British way.