Reeves does the right thing by miners robbed by Tories and gives them Budget boost

Keen to see the injustice against ex miners righted, Mirror political columnist Paul Routledge is delighted by their pension boost in Labour's first Budget – but is sad his old union delegate friend did not live to see it

The devil is always in the detail, but the small print isn’t always diabolical.

In her novel-length Budget, Chancellor Rachel Reeves devoted a paragraph to the plight of retired coal miners.

Viewers of the 76-minute parliamentary marathon could easily have missed it, as some newspapers did, perhaps deliberately. But my ears pricked up when she mentioned change in the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme (MWPS), partly righting another Tory wrong.

When they privatised the coal industry in 1994, the Tories set up a pension scheme with huge assets paid by generations of miners. It was well-run, with trustees elected by the men – but by statute half its annual profits were siphoned off by the Treasury, amounting to billions of pounds: £420 million in the last three years alone.

As Chancellor, Gordon Brown promised to do something about this state theft, but didn’t, perhaps because of the cost. So it fell to Chancellor Reeves to do the right thing, confirming ex-miners will get a bonus of £1.5 billion from the scheme’s investment reserve fund, an annual boost of 32% to 112,000 retirees.

Their pension is still not a king’s ransom, and more work is needed to fully end the Tory robbery, but this is a major milestone after Labour promised a review of MWPS in the election.

The Budget bonus may be seen as a reward for former mining communities – Red Wall seats that went Tory under Boris – returning to the Labour fold. I prefer to believe Robin Hood Rachel understands this long-standing injustice, and did something about it.

My only sadness is my dear friend Johnny Stones, miners’ union delegate at Frickley colliery in west Yorkshire and a trustee of the MWPS, did not live to see this day. He died aged 86 in July, only a week after Labour’s victory promised the very review for which he fought over many years.

Push for more babies

Generation Z-ers, born since 1997, are called “non-natal”. They don't have babies. Perhaps they're too busy queuing at the bar for drinks to do the necessary, but they're definitely letting the side down.

Our multi-generational family has done its bit, and if everybody waited until they could “afford” to have children, the human race would die out. Kids are not a consumer luxury, they are our joy and our future.

They bring happiness and pain in about equal measure, which they understand better when it's their turn to do the job. Every generation is surprised by that reality.

Faced with flagging fertility, the government should help, by getting a grip on the exploitative child care industry. Too often, it's a rip-off.