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You’ll never catch them saying it out loud, of course. They know the outcry it would cause, which would be massive.
I’m sure Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt would like to kill off the triple lock.
They no doubt have plenty of other uses for the billions they could save by doing so.
Naturally, they won’t be caught saying it out loud either. At least, not before the next general election.
Around 12.5million Britons receive the state pension, and for the majority it provides the bulk of their retirement income.
Pensioners are far more likely to vote than anybody else, and they’ll be a lot less likely to vote for Rishi if he scraps the triple lock.
They’ll be too busy burning him in effigy.
Sunak and Hunt both know that. So when the fate of the triple lock is raised in the next election – and the Express will be raising it a lot, believe me – don’t expect a straight answer.
They will umm and they will ahh, knowing full well that the wrong answer could sink their electoral prospects in an instant.
Sunak has repeatedly refused to commit to the policy, leaving millions of pensioners in limbo during the crippling cost of living crisis.
He has already suspended it once as Chancellor, of course, for the 2022/23 tax year. Many will never forgive him for it.
Perhaps surprisingly, Labour leader Keir Starmer has also been evasive on the subject.
When Sunak suspended the triple lock Labour MPs were whipped to abstain on the Parliamentary vote.
Starmer did not call for the mechanism to be kept that year, even though it was a commitment in his party’s electoral manifesto, too.
Starmer could have fought to defend hard-pressed pensioners, yet he didn’t. Many in his party were furious.
I expect Labour to go into the next election with a pledge to stand by the triple lock for the full Parliamentary term.
Then again, so did the Tories, and look what happened last year.
Occasionally, an influential MP breaks cover to reveal what many are secretly thinking in Westminster.
In November, former Chancellor Philip Hammond sparked fury after claiming the triple lock is “hard to justify”.
Yet even he didn’t say the Government should scrap it. Only that there is “a case for looking again at the way we treat pensioners” in the “longer run”.
That is the kind of talk we can expect to hear from our elected representatives whenever the triple lock is mentioned.
Politicians want to get rid of the triple lock, they just don’t know how to get elected after they’ve done it.
If they could crack that conundrum, it would be gone in a flash.
Instead, they will take a sneakier approach.
READ MORE: State pension triple lock ‘could be scrapped – or retire at 74’
They won’t say outright they are going to scrap the triple lock, but skirt around the subject.
They’ll float vague suggestions about how it could be “improved” or “simplified”, say, by downgrading it from a triple to a double lock.
Instead of the state pension rising either by earnings, inflation or 2.5 percent, whichever is highest, they might drop the 2.5 percent element.
Then return for another “simplification” later.
Or they might claim the moral high ground, and say they are downgrading the triple lock in the cause of intergenerational unfairness.
The big argument against the triple lock is that younger taxpayers cannot afford to fund it as the nation ages.
This ignores the fact the younger generation will one day benefit if the state pension is actually worth something when they retire.
This is the way the triple lock dies, sneakily, suddenly… then permanently. Directly after an election, rather than just before it, in the hope that voters will have forgotten come next polling day.
As if.
There is one way to save the state pension triple lock, though. And that’s by raising our voices and clearly telling Westminster just how important it is for all of us.
No politician dare act if we stand behind the triple lock, and that’s what the Express will continue to do. All the way to the election and beyond.
