It’s good to see David Cameron trying to woo the pensioner vote with a ‘guaranteed protection of the State Pension’ and a 2.5 per cent ‘guaranteed’ annual increase – lovely! But shall we examine that?

Anyone who shops on a regular basis will realise that the government are falsely reporting the true rate of inflation. (For some basic items, the price has actually doubled in the last three years).

I have used an old and discarded (but much more realistic) ‘typical basket of goods’ to get a better indication of what is going on, and find that inflation is actually around ten per cent and has been since the coalition opened the floodgates for profiteers.

This situation has obviously been deliberately engineered to try to offset the Government’s unprecedented borrowing by ‘inflating it away’.

To illustrate the ramifications of this skulduggery, if a pensioner had a nest egg of £10,000 at the last election, that nest egg is now worth around £6,500 in spending power. If the Tories are re-elected, that will wipeout the £10K nest egg altogether.

Meanwhile, the banksters are warming up for another bonanza year of massive bonuses at our expense.

Christopher Hindle, Osterley Grove, Bradford