This week, 17.5 million people on various benefits including the state pension and disability living allowance will receive a £10 Christmas bonus. It’s about time though, that Keir Starmer played Scrooge and finally abolished the bonus altogether. For, unlike their Dickensian forebears, poor pensioners this Christmas won’t be going without food or warmth. In fact, they have more than enough of both.

When the Christmas bonus was introduced by the Tory minister Keith Joseph more than 50 years ago, the basic argument was that pensioners needed the money to cope with that year’s soaring inflation of 7.1 per cent. Although believing £10 did not go far enough, the Labour politician Barbara Castle supported it, remarking: ‘Many old-age pensioners and others this winter will be desperate – desperate for food, desperate for clothing and, above all, desperate for warmth.’

In 1972, when 42 per cent of pensioners lived in poverty, the argument for a Christmas bonus might have worked. Today, though, with pensioner poverty at just 16 per cent, it looks to be dubious at best.

It’s about time that Starmer played........

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