A win for the government. Its subtle campaign momentarily convinced me that I had misunderstood the word crisis. The message seeps out of every pore of this administration. Pensions are not in crisis. If they keep saying there is no crisis they must be right. But…?

The nagging doubt remains, so off I went to the dictionary. There are a number of definitions: a decisive moment; a turning point; and a time of difficulty or danger.

Now to two pieces of information which, although published, might as well be covered by the Official Secrets Act. The first is an answer to a parliamentary question I recently tabled.

In its more zany moments, the government kids itself that it has ‘done’ pension reform. For a moment I took them at their word. If all is done and dusted, what impact has this bevy of reforms made to the 12 million workers, when Labour was elected, who were not members of SERPS nor saving for a second pension?

Stakeholder has been knocking around for a couple of years now and the State Second Pension became operational last April. The government has no other plans to ensure adequate pension coverage, except for the Pension Credit. So by how much has the 12 million total of the great pension unwashed been reduced? To 7 million came back the parliamentary answer.

The second piece of ‘secret’ information has been compiled by the Association of Consulting Actuaries. It reported on the number of companies that have ‘adjusted’ their pension schemes. No hint of crisis, at least in the title, just mere adjustments.

But the figures give a radically different picture. Over the last five years, Labour’s time in office, 72% of schemes have either closed their pension schemes to new members, or closed them to future accruals. In addition, 11% percent of companies have already placed one or more of their schemes in to wind-up.

Pension schemes, of course, have a life of their own although, in this instance, life is perhaps not the most accurate of terms. To close a scheme to new members, or worse still, to new accruals, soon changes the power base protecting the pension arrangements.

With today’s turnover of employees, a closed scheme will soon find itself covering only a minority of current employees. Once this stage is reached, employers will naturally seek to wind-up schemes completely.

Occupational pensions are billed by the government as the outstanding welfare success of the past one hundred years. As these schemes collapse, what is left? A state pension, which is set to fall to a nugatory value, to use Michael Portillo’s telling phrase. Stakeholder pensions have still to take off. A State Second Pension is up and operational, but has been crafted so that only those earning below £9000 a year are members.

And, of course, there is the Pension Credit. This credit is set to capture three out of every four pensioners, rewarding them, as the government likes to say, for saving. But hang on a moment. Isn’t there something wrong here?

Saving ought to be something citizens do naturally. This is as bizarre a policy as proposing tax cuts for people who tell the truth. You simply can’t run a society on such a basis, particularly when the Pension Credit is set to rise to a cost of 12-13 pence on the standard rate of tax.

So back to the dictionary definition. There we find a crisis being defined as a time of difficulty or danger, as a decisive moment, as one of those turning points in our history.

With savings plummeting, with Britain’s outstanding welfare success being written out of the script, with the state pension set on a near disappearance policy and a Pension Credit set to replace the national debt, we are told there is no crisis.

The last time a Labour government tried that one on the electorate was in the run-up to the 1979 election. The government may have fooled itself, but it clearly didn’t convince the voters.