PENSIONER bashing – it’s the new political and populist sport. Those beyond working age should undertake compulsory voluntary work (which hardly makes it voluntary does it?) to qualify for a state pension, says one pundit. A sort of National Service for pensioners is one way of looking at it.

In these straitened times pensioners should take their cut like everyone else in receipt of benefits says another. Those deemed to be rich and daring to hang on to the family home should hand their pension back.

Nor should they have a bus pass or receive the winter fuel allowance because they’ve probably got successful offspring who can ferry them round in their Range Rovers and enough cash to have the radiators roaring away in every room of their posh family seat.

We’ve got far too many old people in this country putting massive pressure on services, so we should make everyone work longer so they get their pension later. And if they claim not to be fit enough to do so, make sure you keep covert tabs on them to see if they throw away their stick as they hobble down to the shops to buy their tin of soup for lunch.

Pensioners are sucking the welfare system dry leaving not enough money for younger benefit recipients to buy huge plasma tellies on the never-never, play online bingo while sucking on their obscure brand floor-sweepings fags and swigging one-litre bottles of cider from the beer-off. And let’s face it – a 2.5 per cent increase in the state pension results in single parents’ kids going hungry because there’s not enough money to go round.

I am, of course, making sweeping generalisations. But this is the stuff of the populist, and it seems that pensioners have become fair game for those tasked with sorting out our welfare system as well as the armchair pundit youth lobby who believe everything they read in the papers.

But there’s a fundamental point that everyone forgets. The state retirement pension is not a benefit that should be talked about in the same breath as Job Seeker’s Allowance or universal tax credits. It’s not a patronising “isn't-the-government-good-to-you” handout, and for an awful lot of pensioners it’s certainly not a nice to have bonus – the basic £110.15 a week will hardly have people whooping it up on luxury cruises.

No, the state pension is an entitlement. It doesn’t belong to government, and it doesn’t belong to the taxpayer. It belongs to the person who receives it. It’s their money and no one else’s. For they are the ones who have gone through a lifetime of work where in return for their wage packet they’ve handed over a portion of it in tax to pay the nation’s bills and another portion as part of a compulsory savings scheme called National Insurance.

Yes, if people are fitter for longer, encourage them to keep working. They say the 60s are the new 50s and if people are up for it and want a second or third career let them get on with it. After all, they have a wealth of workplace experience and knowledge that can be brought to bear for the common good.

Yes, encourage people to take out private pension plans and make sure they do it sooner rather than later to make it hopefully, ultimately, worth their while when they're older. No one wants – or should have to – spend their waning years huddled over a one-bar electric fire frightened about how they’re going to keep themselves warm and fed.

We live in a world where those with a treasure chest of life experience are treated as inferior to the bright young things who supposedly represent our future. We treat with condescension those of our citizens who can teach us a thing or two about life because they’ve seen it all before and got several t-shirts to prove it.

We pass them by in the street with never a glance as though their contribution to our society is spent. We call them “love” and “pet” and “darling”, call them by their first names without asking them if it’s all right to do so, and generally treat them like the child they so very often are not.

On top of that there are those of us who appear to begrudge them their retirement pension that is theirs by right. And the fact that here in Britain we have the lowest state pension in Europe says it all.