Welcome to the world of pensioner apartheid

If someone had asked Iain Duncan Smith to find a quick and simple system to ensure the Tories lost 12 -13 million votes at the next election then he could not have done a better job.

That is the number of pensioners and soon-to-be pensioners who are the big time losers under the Tory plans for a pension apartheid and who will probably vote for anyone but the Tories or LibDems at every election from now on

The plans have all the hallmarks of being the product of the mind of an accountant rather than coming through the thought process of anything human so perhaps someone could tell us how you can have a system where someone who has paid full national insurance all their life will end up with £97 a week while someone who has never worked in their life will pick up £155 a week the following day because they were born a day later.

Or indeed how do you tell existing pensioners why they will have to struggle by on the fourth worst pension in the civilised world while new pensioners from 2015 or 2016 onwards will be pulling in more than 50 per cent more for no other reason than that they were born later.

I can see lawyers rubbing hands with glee at the flood of judicial review and human rights claims from pensioners' organisations on everything from discrimination to misselling of SERPS and State Second Pensions and women who have paid a full stamp who find those paying married women's stamps are going to get more pension merely because of a later date of birth.

With Facebook and the like there could be as many pressure groups as pensioners before these proposals are implemented and he Government has no one to blame but itself.

It really does take staggering arrogance to effectively disenfranchise 20 per cent of the population by bringing in a system to supposedly save money which is so blatantly unfair and unjust that anyone but a Tory politician would be ashamed to even suggest it.