Previewing my Week in Westminster

I’m presenting Week in Westminster at 11am on Radio Four today, and get to choose four topics for discussion. My political nodes were, of course, amputated for the purposes of this production. Here are the topics I chose:

1. Young vs Old.
Osborne stepped on a landmine on Thursday: he didn’t expect his pension tax (minor, as Charles Moore argues in the Telegraph) to cause such a reaction. But I suspect he hadn’t realised the depth of feeling in this emerging clash of the generations. Osborne’s idea for freezing pensioners’ tax threshold was lauded on Twitter but lambasted in (most of) the press. Ian Mulheirn’s blog for us claims that pensioners ‘clearly didn’t pay enough’ tax in their working lifetimes; if they had, ‘the country’s finances wouldn’t be in the state they are’. Blaming pensioners for the crash and the ensuing deficit may seem bonkers, but it’s a widely-held view.