Alienate the Veteran Voter at your peril….

Is the Telegraph being a bit churlish today, in reporting "anger as state pension rises by just £2.40 a week"? Fair enough, £2.40 a week is not a lot, nor is the £97.65 a week that state pension recipients will get from next April.

But if the then Chancellor, Gordon Brown, hadn't changed the rules in 2001, the state pension may not have gone up at all. The increase has, for many years, been linked to the increase in the September Retail Price Index which, as the Office for National Statistics announced this morning, actually fell by 1.4% last month.

Mr Brown's 2001 change meant the pension would increase by the September inflation rate or 2.5%, whichever is the higher. A point the Telegraph overlooked today. Along with the fact that it was Mrs Thatcher's administration which pegged pension increases to prices back in 1980. Before that, the benchmark was based on whichever was the higher between prices and earnings. Of course, the latter have outstripped the former fairly consistently since 1980, so the state pension, as a percentage of average earnings, fell from over 23% in 1981 to less than 16% by 2006.

In the interests of scrupulous impartiality, however, I should refer you to the same newspaper's coverage of David Cameron's commitment, announced last month, to match the government's intention of restoring the earnings link by 2015 at the latest. As a shrewd politician, Mr Cameron is all too aware of the power of the grey vote at next year's election.

AF