Why are pensioners treated as such a special case? It’s starting to get silly

What a lot you got!” That’s the Reeves Budget headline for pensioners. While the chancellor was busy clobbering (just about) everyone else, especially “working people”, the elderly got a pass.

Rachel Reeves even boasted about her commitment to the fiscally absurd “triple lock”, which upgrades the state pension by average earnings, inflation as calculated by the consumer prices index (CPI), or 2.5 per cent, whichever is higher.

This will deliver an inflation-busting rise of 4.8 per cent, good for an extra £575 next year. It’s nice enough for me, I guess. I’m much closer to retirement age than I am to being a school leaver and joining the workforce, although I’m not in any rush to join the party. I like working, despite Reeves’s squeeze on my earnings.

It’s almost as if the chancellor and her party were so stung by the outraged reaction to the winter fuel cut that they decided to make up for it with a shower of sweeties. Much more of this and she’ll be getting a telling off from health secretary Wes Streeting for giving old folk too much sugar.

The bitter irony for those of us being stung with higher taxes and charges to pay for this naked bribe – a demographic millstone around the neck of the nation when you consider how quickly the population is ageing – is that Reeves chose to make it harder for us to save for retirement.

Those of us with salary sacrifice pension schemes were among her targets for extra taxes. Reeves, the cabinet and the MPs surrounding them all benefit from copper-bottomed indexed pensions linked to their generous salaries, which we pay for, so they are immune to this part of the tax grab.

Don’t talk to me about fairness, chancellor, just don’t, because this stinks – and I think you know it does. It represents another body blow delivered to “working people” who do the responsible thing, who sacrifice to save and provide for their own retirements, to the benefit of the state as well as themselves. A private pension reduces the government’s costs. The hit to salary sacrifice was one of the most cynical and deeply divisive moves by the chancellor. Shame on her.

But back to the pensioners she loves. Yet more sweeties came via changes to the individual savings account (ISA) rules. Working-age adults are having the amount they can save via a cash ISA cut by £8,000. The overall limit ISA will be held at £20,000 a year, but anything above £12,000 must be invested in the markets. Except for pensioners. They’re exempt.

I’m no fan of the cash ISA. I actually think the chancellor should have gone further than she did. If you can afford to stash £20,000 away, you should be putting some of it in the markets, not least because you will do much better over the long term.

But why do pensioners get treated as a special case? I get that their requirements are for low-risk savings, which produce an income. There are, however, plenty of investment funds that do the job and back British business in the process. Their risk profiles are low, and the offer yields that eclipse the best cash ISAs.

The reason is that this is yet another vote-grubbing bribe. I get that pensioners traditionally garner sympathy and tend to vote in numbers, but while the rest of us are having our pockets picked, pensioners are being told that they can stay living on the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

It’s starting to get silly. For years, this demographic has been buttered up and mollycoddled by successive governments, which have repeatedly told the rest of us that there is no money. George Osborne protected them from the cutbacks imposed through austerity, a policy followed by his successors. Now, Reeves is protecting them from her tax grab.

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. There is a teensy sting in the tail.

Reeves’s biggest earner is her decision to freeze thresholds, aka the ultimate stealth tax. With each pay rise, hundreds of thousands of “working people” are going to find their pay rise isn’t actually anything to celebrate because it will drag them into a higher tax band.

You could very easily make the case that this violates Labour’s election pledge not to hike income tax just as much as putting tuppence on the basic rate, as one of those by now infamous pre-Budget leaks suggested was on the cards.

The monster under the bed is that the state pension is going up so quickly that it will soon be taxable. Another inflation-busting £575 increase will see it pass the frozen tax-free personal allowance of £12,570. This has been dubbed the retirement tax. What are the odds that Reeves scraps it and makes working people pay instead?