By emphasising the need to control expenditure the Coalition has courted the austere image of Ebenezer Scrooge. That is most undeserved. Scrooge was successful. The Dickens character whom this government most resembles is Mr Micawber, forever hoping for something to turn up. Despite their rhetoric, on pensions Coalition ministers are merely deferring the need to face up to the demographic crisis to a time when they will have moved on to heaven, hell or the House of Lords.

If it is so obvious that a state pension based on lifetime accumulation is better than a retirement dole system, you may wonder why the change has never been made. There is a poison pill at the heart of the current system. A Ponzi scheme only works so long as the music keeps playing and none of the participants wants to withdraw. Current workers pay for current retirees, in the expectation that a future generation will pay for them in turn. If you switch to an accumulation system, older workers will not have sufficient time to build up funds to provide an adequate future income and no one will be picking up the tab for the already retired. That means those groups will have to be compensated by what amounts to buying out their accrued pension promises—at a cost of about £2 trillion. The state, of course, would have to recoup that sum by placing additional burdens upon the current workers, who would end up paying twice. The choice is between throwing granny into the gutter and taxing her descendants into the workhouse.

Nor is it feasible to borrow the funds now and repay them later as the savings are realised. Ignore the minor point that this is not really the time for the Treasury to try to borrow £2 trillion. Even in the unlikely event that rates remained at their present historic low level, the interest charges that would be incurred until the whole debt was redeemed would obliterate any savings from making the change and distort the capital markets in the meanwhile.

So, while accumulation-based pensions offer us a land of milk and honey, no government has risked the trek through the desert to reach it. What is needed is a way to get our hands on all that lovely future money so that we can spend it now. But no one has yet been able to invent a method to do so.

Until now.