MULTIMILLIONAIRE Reform UK MP Richard Tice’s attack on public-sector pensions exposes the party’s anti-working class character.

The claim that “gold-plated” pensions for public servants such as health and education workers are an impossible burden on the taxpayer is classic divide-and-rule propaganda.

Tice wants an end to defined benefit pension schemes, which provide a predictable income in retirement. But the scandal is not that these schemes still exist in the public sector but that they have been steadily withdrawn across the private sector.

Pensions are deferred wages and attacks on retirement income form part of the decades-long assault on working-class living standards, with wages accounting for a shrinking share of GDP since the 1970s while the share taken in profits and rents has risen.

Britain is not broke: rather we are living through what the Sunday Times Rich List has called a “golden age of the super rich.” British billionaires increased their wealth by £35 million every single day last year; banks and energy companies post record-breaking profits year on year.

This reality is masked by a Westminster consensus on cosseting the rich. All Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s cuts — from means-testing winter fuel through attacking disabled people’s social security payments to the departmental spending cuts she is expected to announce on Wednesday — could be avoided if the government chose instead to tax wealth and profits.

Tice’s bid to steal pension income from teachers and nurses, firefighters and police officers shows that Reform UK, whatever its cynical posturing over individual issues, shares the pro-corporate, anti-worker outlook of the Establishment parties and is not an alternative to them.

Public opinion does not favour attacks on working-class people’s pension entitlements. Reform has let the mask slip: its council and parliamentary candidates should be pressed on why they don’t think public servants deserve decent pensions.