The Tory ‘tax-cutting’ agenda is fooling no one

Something has to go badly wrong for anyone to become nostalgic for 2020. But the Tory’s latest election announcement – to create the ‘Triple Lock Plus’ – is just the thing to do it.

The first autumn after the pandemic hit, then-chancellor Rishi Sunak was looking at the public finances in dismay, wondering how he might even try to account for the heavy spending that he, his party and Labour had rushed through parliament earlier in the year. But the strange circumstances of the pandemic – including the mandate for young and low-risk people to ‘stay home’ – also created an opportunity to address some outstanding and unfair public policy: the triple lock on the state pension.

Plenty of Tories were ready to overhaul it. They had come to view the triple lock – which sees the state pension rise by average wage hikes, inflation or 2.5