Last week the Bank of England was warned to prepare for a financial crisis triggered by the discovery of extraterrestrial life. But the really worrying scenario isn’t aliens. It’s us.

A century ago the state pension as we know it was introduced. Taxes from employers and their staff were used to pay out benefits to the elderly once they hit retirement age. There was no means-testing, and this benefit for all removed the stigma associated with claiming welfare. It was a roaring success. But it won’t see another 100 years.

It’s always been wrong to call it a pension. It’s a benefit paid out of current taxation like any other. There’s never been an investment pot built up or paid into. The state pension runs more like a Ponzi scheme. And that scheme was doomed as soon as Britain’s birth rate began to fall. A country of the young has become a nation of the elderly. Just 50 years ago there were around four working-age Britons for every pensioner; now it’s closer to 3.6 – and by 2070 it’s projected to be about 2.5. They won’t be able to pay enough taxes to keep this benefit going in anything like its current form.

If the Ponzi scheme nature of state pensions provided the kerosene, then the triple-lock policy was the torch that set fire to the whole thing. Guaranteeing an annual increase of whichever is highest of inflation, average earnings growth or 2.5 per cent was a Liberal Democrat manifesto commitment at the 2010 general election and adopted as coalition government policy by David Cameron a year later. It has proved disastrous.

Britain’s tax-and-spend watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), says the policy is already........

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