2m pensioners £100 worse off, say Tories

2m pensioners £100 worse off, say Tories

More than 2 million pensioners will lose up to £100 this year as a planned rise in the pension credit is wiped out by inflation, the Tories claimed yesterday. George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, said it was a sign of how Britain had become less fair over the past decade under Labour.

In a document entitled An Unfair Britain, Osborne claimed that this year's 4.2% increase in the guarantee credit - a minimum income for poor pensioners - would be "eaten up" by inflation, which hits pensioners harder. Inflation for pensioners is between 5.2% and 5.6%, meaning that a couple will lose £98 this year and a single pensioner £90.

The document says: "Labour's taxes and rising cost of living mean that pension increases for poor pensioners will be entirely eaten up by higher inflation." Pensioners were suffering because they "spend a much higher percentage of their income on high-inflation goods like heating, light and food."

The document is designed to attack Gordon Brown on his abiding political philosophy - the pursuit of fairness. In a speech to the centre-left think tank Demos tomorrow, Osborne will say that Brown can no longer portray himself as the champion of fairness after a decade in which Britain has stepped backwards in key areas.

He will say that Brown has failed even on his "narrow definition" of fairness - the promotion of equality - because the number of people in deep poverty has risen by 900,000 since 1997; the gap.....continued below

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in life expectancy between the rich and poor is the highest since the Victorian age; and the poorest fifth of households pay more of their income in tax than any other group. Osborne said last night: "The truth is that Gordon Brown's old-fashioned leftist idea that 'only the state can guarantee fairness' has led to a decade of top-down state control policies that have made the country less fair. Brown's Labour means an unfair Britain.

"This autumn we are going to step up the pressure to make sure that Gordon Brown's obsession with his own short-term survival does not do long-term damage to Britain. That would not be fair."

The Tory attack comes after Labour launched the first wave of an autumn assault on David Cameron. In a Guardian article yesterday, the Treasury chief secretary, Yvette Cooper, warned that "Cameronomics" was designed to hide a "red meat" Tory agenda of tax cuts behind pretty photo opportunities. The government said last night that 1.5 million more pensioners would be in poverty had Labour followed the Tory approach of simply uprating the tax and benefit system. A spokeswoman for the Department for Work and Pensions said: "In 1997 the poorest pensioners lived on £69 a week. Today pension credit means no pensioner need live on less than £124 a week."

In a book published yesterday, Cameron says binge drinking is making many cities uninhabitable. "It's like the Wild West," he says in the book, based on conversations with GQ editor Dylan Jones.

Asked how much he drinks a week, Cameron says: "Moderately, but probably more than I'm meant to. The unit count is sometimes quite challenging. I like having a couple of glasses of wine in the evening with dinner. Most nights I'll have a couple of glasses of wine."

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