Rishi Sunak has declared war on young people

“Here is my message to CCHQ: if you really want to play on my contempt for young people, bring in a quadruple lock.” This was a tweet I read over the weekend – a very funny and good tweet, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Maybe someone in Tory Towers saw it too, because less than four hours later the words quadruple lock were appearing on the front page of this newspaper, as the Tories vowed to automatically raise the threshold at which retirees start paying income tax each year so that it stays ahead of the state pension.

It’s just another day in what is already shaping up to be quite an unserious election cycle. Over the bank holiday a beleaguered Rishi Sunak was forced to film TikToks explaining that actually “no, I’m not sending everyone off to join the Army”, after much derision of his policy to bring back national service.

No, what he is actually doing is introducing a “bold new model of national service” where 18-year-olds will be able to choose between a military commission or one weekend a month volunteering in their community. Glad we cleared that up.

Taken alongside Tuesday’s announcement, these policies have been met with collective eye-rolling from the younger end of the electorate, who have frankly come to expect this sort of thing from this increasingly desperate Tory party.

“It’s not a bold enough policy,” deadpanned one Twitter-user. “Quintuple lock: Boomers get given a lottery ticket every Friday night and the prize money is taken from help-to-buy Isas of 22-year-olds.”

It’s not so much that young people want pensioners to be in poverty. It’s more that it would be nice for the Government’s fiscal policy to benefit us in a similarly meaningful way. As a treat, you know?

For context, while all this is happening, Michael Gove has walked the plank, taking with him the renters reform bill.

I’m not going to get into whether these might have worked as intended – to protect my peace from irate landlords. But for all their perceived flaws, Gove’s initiatives were at least sympathetic to the plight of young people.

Now they’re gone, and instead the Conservatives are going all in for infantilising policies like forced volunteering and more restrictions on young drivers. At least the youth can still have a cig to take the edge off, not that the Tories didn’t try to snatch that off them too.

I am morbidly curious to see whether the state pension will have an octcuple lock by the time a future prime minister finally takes it behind the bins and euthanises it. But the thing is, I don’t begrudge the current generation of retirees a generous state pension.

It’s abundantly clear that a state benefit as generous as the triple lock will not exist when Generation Z retires, if we get to retire at all. Instead, we are being subtly primed to feather our own nests without the state’s help.

Employers are now required to auto-enrol us in workplace pensions; DIY investing, Isas, and the importance of getting on the property ladder are more universally understood than they were when today’s retirees were in their 20s. Who knows? Maybe the Government’s fabled pensions dashboard may actually be made.

Simply put, not having your own retirement fund sorted will be less excusable in 50 years than it is now. In an ideal world we won’t miss the triple lock.

Despite the Conservatives’ (and indeed Labour’s) efforts to commit to the triple-lock, it may be a moot point even for many of its beneficiaries. I have lost count of the number of pensioners I have asked about the triple lock in the last two years, and I have always been surprised how ambivalent many of them seem to be about it.

For boomers who amassed buy-to-let empires robust enough to let them retire in their 50s, or those with unbelievably generous final salary pensions, the state pension matters little to them. They are lucky.

But for Britain’s poorest retirees, who are entirely reliant on the state pension, no amount of inflation-linked pay rises will matter – not when they are haemorrhaging thousands of pounds a year on energy just to stay warm.

It is fundamentally lazy to just keep forcing working people to pay for further upgrades to the state pension as a universal benefit, when it obviously needs to be means tested. Like it or not, we have a duty to our vulnerable and elderly.

But Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives are using the state pension to pit young and old against each other. Sunak’s vision of teenagers being forced to deliver prescriptions to the elderly will only foster intergenerational resentment – and adding more security to the state pension will do the same.

The Tories want pensioners to join their war on the young, but I don’t believe Britain’s retirees are naive enough to fall for it.