WORK (sic) and Pensions Secretary Ian Duncan-Smith’s announcement that the state pension age is set to rise to 66 is the latest example of this Con-Dem government randomly legislating with no thought to the long term consequences of their cuts on individuals, society or the economy.

He even had the cheek to quote people as telling him “...we want to go on working because it helps our income...” so even the inadequacy of the state pension is being recruited as a reason for stopping it altogether!

Perhaps Mr Clegg, his boss’s sidekick, also hasn’t noticed that it bears all the usual Tory hallmarks - saves money, targets the less well off, leaves the state with a lesser burden and steals from working people their hopes of a reasonable length of retirement after a lifetime’s work.

With the increase in VAT, the £700 million taken from the public sector pensions that workers have already paid for and now this “work till you drop” bombshell, we have a combination that will dramatically increase the number of people who will have to rely on the state in their later years.

A majority of 64 year old men are already out of the labour market. Raising the state pension age will not help any of them stay in work, it will simply turn a generation of 65 year olds from pensioners to the unemployed!

There is, of course, a huge difference between a non-manual worker than say, an agricultural or industrial worker having to face an extra year at work at 65. The option of another year in a field or on a building site in February is not one to be faced by someone in a centrally heated city office, staring at a computer screen and ready to pocket another bonus on top of an overblown salary.

Margaret Thatcher did her best to “...turn back the welfare state...”. Her grandchildren are now engaged in dismantling it completely.

Fortunately electors in Leominster South have the opportunity of registering an early repost to this Tory onslaught and Liberal hypocrisy by returning Labour’s Phillipa Roberts in the Town Council election due on July 8. It might seem a long way from Westminster, but until Mr Clegg does the decent thing and pull the rug from this shameless party of greed is the best they can do!