It's not fair that pensioners are treated as a special case

“What a lot you got!” That’s the Reeves Budget headline for pensioners.

- JAMES MOORE

While the chancellor was busy clobbering (just about) everyone else, especially “working people”, the elderly got a pass.

Rachel Reeves even boasted about her commitment to the fiscally absurd “triple lock”, which upgrades the state pension by average earnings, inflation as calculated by the consumer prices index (CPI), or 2.5 per cent, whichever is higher.

This will deliver an inflation-busting rise of 4.8 per cent, good for an extra £575 next year. It's nice enough for me, I guess. I'm much closer to retirement age than I am to being a school leaver and joining the workforce, although I'm not in any rush to join the party. I like working, despite Reeves's squeeze on my earnings.

It's almost as if the chancellor and her party were so stung by the outraged reaction to the winter fuel cut that they decided to make up for it with a shower of sweeties. Much more of this and she'll be getting a telling off from health secretary Wes Streeting for giving old folk too much sugar.

The bitter irony for those of us being stung with higher taxes and charges to pay for this naked bribe - a demographic millstone around the neck of the nation when you consider how quickly the population is ageing - is that Reeves chose to make it harder for us to save for retirement.