After alienating farmers, pensioners, smokers and business owners, Keir Starmer has now angered the WASPI women. Finally, a deserving target! Has there ever been a less sympathetic special interest group than a bunch of entitled boomers who were too dopy to have heard that their pension age was going up to 65? This announcement was first made in 1993. Princess Diana and Kurt Cobain were still alive. Oasis had yet to release a single. Tony Blair was the shadow home secretary. I was still at school. I spent my entire adult life knowing that the pension age for women was going to be made the same as men’s until 2018 — a quarter of a century later — when it finally happened. 

The WASPI women will not be getting their “compensation”. They think this is not fair and feel let down by the Labour Party. On the latter point, join the club. On the former, get stuffed. Their claim is that at no point between 1993 and 2018 did anyone tell them that they would not be getting their pension at the age of 60. At no point, they insist, did it ever come up in conversation with friends, family or colleagues. They never read any of the voluminous coverage in newspapers and magazines. They never saw it mentioned on Ceefax or — somewhat more recently — the internet. They never heard anything about it on the television or radio, nor did they receive one of the millions of letters sent out by the government. They were, they say, too busy raising their families and/or working. Without someone from the government literally knocking on their front door and shouting the news into their lugholes, how could they be expected to know? 

One such case is Hilary Simpson whose sob story was reported by the Guardian this week. Hilary worked in local government in an office right next door to the HR department. She took early retirement at the age of 55, safe in the knowledge that she would be getting a state pension in five years time, although she didn’t bother checking. Having been given “an attractive offer” of a lump sum and then a reduced pension, she “drew up a spreadsheet for how to make the lump sum last five years, then signed on the dotted line”. The use of a spreadsheet suggests that she is capable of some degree of financial planning. Only later did she discover the flaw. Deprived of the easy life by a failure to go on the internet for 30 seconds, she blames everyone but herself. Equalising pensions without putting up a billboard outside her house is, she says, “a serious, constitutional issue”.

Are they completely lacking in self-awareness or are they trying to wind us up?

If that doesn’t tug on the very strings of your heart, John Roberts has looked at some of the women who complained to the ombudsman (they don’t watch the news, these waspy women, but they’ve all heard of the ombudsmen), including one who now regrets buying a cottage and a flat (in addition to her main home), one who retired aged 47 and is cheesed off, and numerous women who have simply calculated how much cash they would have got from the state if the state pension system was still sexist and think that it’s not fair. 

As Roberts says, “Why on earth didn’t the campaign put forward cases of real need”? Are they completely lacking in self-awareness or are they trying to wind us up? Do they want us to hate them? That would certainly explain why they named their organisation after an insect that everyone despises. I assume it stands for Women Appreciating State Pension Inequality, but in the spirit of the cause I am not going to check.