Letter: Pension rights and wrongs

Sir: The National Insurance system is not a relic of the sentimental left ("Why I should give back my widow's pension", 4 December). It is a critically important part of the new democracy set up after the Second World War, and founded on the work and thoughts of politicians of the right, left and centre in a working group appointed by Winston S Churchill (Conservative).

When a voter is forced by law to pay a compulsory NI premium in proportion to his/her earnings, social and financial justice requires that their state pension return be also related to earnings. Not to do so amounts to legalised fraud. A private insurance body would find its directors liable to prison for theft.

If Margaret Thatcher, Harriet Harman and Polly Toynbee want state pensions to continue to be divorced from earnings, they must require that compulsory state premiums be a fixed amount indexed to prices. We voters are in revolt, especially those of us who started work in 1948 and have become desperate after nearly two decades of financial abuse.

OWEN EVANS

Bromyard, Herefordshire