‘Pensioners CAN trust Labour – but not necessarily for the noblest of reasons,’ writes Stephen Pound

It is an indisputable fact that most of the vast number of pensioner benefits introduced in the past thirty years came courtesy of a Labour government.

From the winter fuel allowance and cold weather payments to free Television licences for the over 75s to the minimum income guarantee and senior citizen travel benefits Labour has a more than respectable record when it comes to giving our seniors the credit that they deserve for a lifetime’s contribution to the economy.

However, anyone who is wholly convinced that this basket of benefits was agreed out of the purest emotions of respect for our elders will have to face up to an equally indisputable fact.

No Government – Labour or Conservative – is going to do anything other than seek to be seen as the champion of the older generations.

The recent debate around the pension triple lock shows that even hard-headed Tories are not immune from this imperative and reveals one of the effects of the iron law of politics.

The squeaking wheel gets the oil.

Pensioners are not shrinking violets when it come to making the case for the defence, and often the expansion, of those advantages they currently receive and they hold in their armoury one of the most potent weapons in the United Kingdom's political arsenal.

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Pensioners vote. They vote in far greater numbers than any other demographic and this enables them to wield enormous power and to absolutely guarantee that their hard-won gains will not be removed even if there is a very strong case for reducing the triple-locked pension in the light of an expanding cohort of the elderly and an economy so sluggish that it makes even a snail seem like a speedster.

The then Chancellor, Brown, recognised that the other characteristic of the grey brigades was a propensity to vote Conservative.

An old saying has it that if you are not a socialist before you are under thirty you haven’t a heart and if you are still one after the age of thirty you haven’t a brain.

I dispute this but with very few exceptions – Tony Benn being the obvious one – politicians and humans tend to move further to the right as the years clock up.

Gordon Brown’s aim was to win over the senior citizen vote by delivering a range of sweeteners that massively improved the lot of UK pensioners, even if it didn’t produce a huge swing to Labour.

The concentration on material benefits to pensioners also ignores a very influential area indeed.

Pensioners are just as concerned about the NHS, the defence of the realm, law and order, housing, transport, and a raft of issues not seen as exclusively the concern of the senior.

Indeed; it can be seen as a little patronising to assume that pensioners are a group exclusively concerned with their own personal issues and not those of wider society.

Full disclosure; as a “baby boomer” who has lived through the longest period of peace and rising living standards in the history of our nation I greatly appreciate my triple locked pension, free or reduced cost transport and such perks as the winter fuel allowance. However; I also accept that protection of pensioners should not be predicated on voting trends but reflect respect for a generation and recognition of the impact that an increasingly older number of people of that generation has on the national economy.

The author of the Beveridge Report that set a blueprint for a National Health Service based his costings on the assumption that men would leave school at fifteen, work until they were sixty-five and die by their seventy-fifth birthday. Women were expected not to work but to remain in the home as carers for the sick and infirm. For now, and possibly for the future the pensioners rule and they are most certainly safe with Labour.