Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Cameron has created a socialist utopia for pensioners

On the radio this morning, a campaigner from the Child Poverty Action Group had an ’emperor’s new clothes’ moment. Why not, she said, treat the young like the old. If the Tories insisted on having a ‘triple lock’ on pension benefits for the elderly, which guaranteed that the state pension must increase every year by whatever target was the highest – inflation, average earnings or a minimum of 2.5 per cent – why not put a triple lock on the benefits of poor families. The state would then treat the young like the old, and subsidise the future as it subsidises the past.

You will understand why she was speaking out of turn when you listen to David Cameron describe his plans to cut £12 billion today. In truth, Cameron does not want to cut the welfare state, just a part of the welfare state that helps the working poor.

When it comes to pensioners, however, his fiscal conservatism vanishes. His commitment to the state subsidies for the elderly is close to socialist. As Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies says, 30 years ago pensioners were much more likely to be poorer than their younger counterparts were. In 2011, for the first time, the average incomes of pensioner households rose above the average incomes of the rest of the population. As for people retiring now, on average they will be better off in retirement than they were when they were working.

It does not stop there. Gross spending on pensions for former public sector employees approached £36 billion in 2014. Despite some reforms, these pensions, and those still being accrued by current public sector workers, are hugely more generous than almost anything in the private sector. Finally, just before the election, George Osborne used public money to fund one of the most naked electoral bribes I have seen: pensioner bonds, where the state, or rather the taxpayer, subsidised higher interest rates for the over-65s.

We are moving towards a gerontocracy, where the smartest financial move you can make is to grow old; where politicians go hoarse as they shout of their love for ‘hard-working families’, while all the time directing subsidies to families who don’t work at all.

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