When was the last time you met somebody in the private sector with a final salary pension? Yes, it was a long time ago wasn’t it – sort of in between Arthur Scargill and Loadsamoney. Did you ever know anyone in private commerce with a non-contributory final salary pension? Me neither.

And by the way, did you ever have an employer dolling out index-linked pensions without making any contributions either?

These do exist – all of them – in the Civil Service, according to a government-commissioned report into the existing public sector released yesterday. They are called – wait for it – ‘unfunded pension liabilities’, and the principle of them is simple: neither the Ministry nor the employee pay a penny towards the fund – it’s all to be supplied out of future tax payments by us.

Now in case you’re thinking The Slog has gone all Daily Mail and no figures, this is what the commission’s audit of UK employer pension provision shows: while just 11% of us are on final-salary schemes (and I don’t know about you, but I’m on nothing like that) 94% of public sector employees are.

So if you were fair-minded and even vaguely aware of the nation’s deep hole of Brown stuff, you’d say “Right – it’s a fair cop: we’ll have to live like everyone else does from now on”.

But then, you’re not in the TUC.

This is the TUC’s carefully considered response to the Report:

“Britain’s real pensions scandal is the retreat by employers from providing pensions. Two out of three private sector workers get no employer support towards a pension,” said general secretary Brendan Barber, “yet here we have the representatives of those employers coming after public sector pensions too. Of course all pensions need to change from time to time, but this report is from people who simply want to reduce taxes for business and the super-rich.”

Yes of course they do dear, of course they do: this is all a plot to stuff your private sector workers…..by doing a survey of public sector pensions.

The Left in general and the Trade Unions in particular are reverting to the Ed Balls approach: not so much cloth-cap socialism as clock-back socialism. In this sense, I wouldn’t call this TUC reaction knee-jerk. I see it more as a Pavlovian dog trained to bare rather old and yellow teeth at every mention of the word ‘reform’.

The truly disturbing part of the Commission’s finding, however, is contained in a somewhat blithe statement at one point that the liabilities ‘are twice what was previously thought’.

Now there is only one way that can happen: organised lying on a grand scale by Ministers responsible, with the collusion of the lucky Mandarin recipients.

I now need Brendan Barbspart at the TUC to explain to me why the Party it sponsors and the members it represents are any better than the bankers and their hernia-inducing bonuses.