Lock Steps

The triple lock puts money in the pockets of the people who spend it, injecting it into the consumer economy, and thus employing the young. But the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Pensions, Torsten Bell, goes beyond Kemi Badenoch's call to means test the triple lock by wanting to abolish it altogether. Thus speaks the Department for Work and Pensions, whose official consultation on the predetermined conclusion of three billion pounds in cuts to disability benefits was found by the High Court to have been misleading and unlawful.

While it was delivering that finding, Keir Starmer was signing Britain up to pay three billion pounds to Ukraine every year for the next hundred years, three hundred billion pounds in total. Although the Independent Alliance may be, no party in the House of Commons is opposed to that. But when it came to saving the triple lock, then the Independents, the Greens, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and all of the Northern Irish parties are true believers, while Reform UK has an electorate to cultivate, as do the Liberal Democrats.