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Pensioners' lunch

The couple of pensioners' lunches in London that I attended were indeed pleasant occasions and it is sad that the peanuts to which Michael Reupke eloquently referred are being withheld, or rather abruptly abolished [No more pensioners’ lunches - Tom Glocer]. But surely the more important issue for most pensioners is not the lunch, but the pensions themselves. The lack of reasonable annual increases, more or less in line with inflation, for those who toiled over many years to transform the news agency which I joined half a century ago from an impoverished struggler into a company now able to pay its leaders millions each year is disgraceful. Yes, of course such increases would incur a modest dip into Thomson Reuters profits, especially now with the Pension Fund's income hard hit by external factors far beyond its control. But they are feasible if those now at the top would give due recognition to the very hard labour of those who made their current position possible. Or should we just resign ourselves to saying: "Why did we bother?" ■