when the policy matured I could expect to receive a significant amount of cash after paying-off my mortgage
We had a similar experience.
Did you make a mis-selling claim?
We did and got the £1500 back that we had lost.

I lost £1000’s – where did all my money go?
Bad investments. But that does not mean that you should never invest again.
An analogy is getting food poisioning and deciding never to eat again !!
I'm sure you would agree that would be a bad decision.

Nothing is certain and no one can predict what will happen when we reach retirement age.
True there are risks.
But you need to understand there are risks with doing nothing (having a very poor retirement) and risks with putting it under the mattress (not even keeping up with inflation).

The government could be on to something – if they keep raising the retirement age there will be no need for a state pension.
We are all living longer and therefore pensions are getting more expensive.
Yes, the government will have to default in some ways because it's a cast iron certainty that they cannot afford their liabilities.
I don't expect to get a state pension and I'm planning for it.

I would say two things.
Don't have knee-jerk reactions about things you read in ther paper, do some proper reasearch. A pension is merely a tax free wrapper that's all. It's the underlying investments that count and we all know that the meeja just want to sell papers etc. and are all morally corrupt anyway e.g. phone hacking scandal.
Secondly if you do decide you don't like pensions or investments then that doesn't mean it's ok to do NOTHING. That way you'll have a really miserable last few decades. Regardless of how you do it, you still need to plan your retirement, so it's not going to help just to throw the towel in.