The triple lock: bad news for pensioners and a missed opportunity for Labour

What’s the key demographic challenge for Labour if it is to win the next election? Scotland? The ‘Red Wall’? No, it’s older voters. If only the over-65s voted, Labour would have lost every election since 1997 – and by increasingly large margins. You’d think Labour would be on the lookout, with meerkat-like alacrity, for wedge issues to win back the votes of our older citizens, wouldn’t you?

Every Labour MP stood on a manifesto backing the ‘triple lock’ on pensions, by which the state pension increases by wages, inflation or 2.5%, whichever is higher. Yet on Monday, those same MPs were whipped to abstain on legislation to dump the triple lock.

Labour did not call for the triple lock to be kept this year, but did point out that it broke a Tory manifesto pledge. So, we’re not opposing it ourselves, while highlighting that we probably should have done. This is a position so contorted that Simone Biles would struggle to achieve it, and so diluted that it’s virtually homeopathic.

Some have suggested that pensioners have been insulated from the austerity suffered by others. This will come as news to the two million pensioners who live in poverty, and the many pensioner households facing fuel poverty this winter.

Others suggest that an above inflation pension rise cannot be justified this year, especially when others are suffering. Labour doesn’t stand for an equality of misery, however. I know the Tories are using the slogan, but Labour should genuinely want to level up.

The Conservatives broke a manifesto promise to their electoral base – scrapping the triple lock in a year when their energy price cap allows bills to increase by 12%. Labour could have campaigned to defend the triple lock and pensioners’ modest incomes, earning back some support after the 13 long years in which we failed to restore the earnings link and it was left to David Cameron and Nick Clegg to do it.

As research commissioned by former shadow chancellor John McDonnell recently showed, the UK state pension is more than £50 a week lower than it would be if Margaret Thatcher hadn’t broken the earnings link in 1980 – the UK has one of the least generous pensions in Europe.

Labour appears unable to campaign at the moment, mired in debilitating caution, and incapable of seizing an opportunity handed to us on a platter. The Conservatives had been floating their intention to abandon the triple lock for months. Labour could and should have been building a campaign to defend it over this time – writing in the newspapers read by older voters, deploying targeted ads on Facebook, and mobilising local parties to do leaflet drops for older voters to capitalise on the Tories’ betrayal.

It could have been woven neatly into that nice line Keir Starmer has used about wanting Britain to be “the best country to grow up in, and the best country to grow old in”. Starmer was reported as telling the parliamentary party that after his summer tour he was convinced voters were open to supporting Labour but needed the party “to give them a reason”. Well, indeed.

Perhaps the focus groups didn’t come back in time – but the point of politics is not merely to reflect opinion but to shape it, too. We need to campaign, and in so doing build the coalition of voters required to win.

If only the Labour leadership spent the same time and energy organising campaigns against the Conservative government as they do plotting last-minute rule changes to party conference. Still, I’m sure Britain’s pensioners will come flooding back to Labour once they hear of its focus on the relative merits of the electoral college versus one-member-one-vote.