MR A SEDGWICK (Letters, February 12) accuses me of making up wrongs suffered by pensioners under the Tories. The contract by a previous government guaranteed that "the basic pension will be increased in line with earnings or prices, whichever is better for you".

The Tories broke the up-rating link with earnings in 1980; they put two fingers up at us by cutting income tax for the rich; and they increased National Insurance contributions.

"Mythical trials and tribulations", Mr Sedgwick, and "integrity"?

Because of this betrayal, at the end of the 18 Tory years, pensioner couples were being done out of £30 a week and single pensioners of £20. Three million were so poor that they had to have support for a bare existence. One is sorry that a lady like Mr Sedgwick's 96-year-old mother is being hassled by the (Tory-privatised) Benefits Agency through a cut in her pension. If this is her state pension, it must be an administrative blunder - perhaps by the demented National Insurance computer of Shadow Social Secretary spokesman Iain Duncan-Smith's complaint (Letters December 31).

New Labour are committed not to cut the state pension. I expect they may do so once they devise a spin to present this as a benevolent act by a caring government.

Mythical, perhaps - unlike the kites flown by Tory ministers Nigel Lawson and John Moore at the end of the 1980s about how well off pensioners had become during the Tory economic miracle, and did they really need such generosity from the state?

In the end, Margaret Thatcher got cold feet; she need not have worried about the pensioner vote because most had gone soft in the head but she was busy inventing her own vote-winner: the poll tax.

It is heart-warming that those knights-errant, MPs Iain Duncan-Smith and Nigel Evans, in sorting out the lady's problem have done the job for which we pay them (well). May she long continue voting for Nigel Evans, the pensioner's friend.

G E RAYNER, The Sycamores, Whinney Lane, Langho.

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