ANOTHER sound Budget from our Chancellor maintaining the stability of the strong economy and investing more money for future growth, which promises growing prosperity for our descendants.

My generation see this as the long-term results of our efforts and are happy and proud to have contributed.

Among the credit Gordon Brown proudly claims on behalf of the Labour Party, he includes a fanfare for his pathetic attempt to keep the old people quiet at election time with more drip-feeding and a further dose of tranquillisers.

For them, more of the 1930s policies of inquisition and means-testing, public assistance and measured pity, when all they really need is a reasonable pension linked to average wages, and the pride of knowing they are valued by those for whom they have helped provide.

Politicians need votes. They only act under pressure and not enough people are prepared to put them under pressure about pensions.

They must be made to make proper provision for pensioners an essential part of our national life.

Unless they are, many of today's voters have little chance of fair shares in the benefits of the society they are working so hard to modernise.

They will have to accept tiny scraps tossed their way every four years, to ease the effects of devaluation on their fixed income, while the rest of the nation enjoys the ever increasing fruits of their earlier labours.

Now is the time to change all that.

George Appleby,

Leighton Croft,

Clifton, York.

Updated: 10:42 Saturday, March 19, 2005