He claims that the pension will be about £440 a year higher from April than if it had been increased in line with average earnings since 2011-12, as though this represents a step forward for pensioners' living standards.

Average workers' wages have fallen by £1,300 every year since 2010, according to a University of Birmingham report, so that at least one in five workers now earns less than a living wage of £13,600.

In addition, Joseph Rowntree Foundation research indicates that half of the 13 million people suffering poverty in Britain today live in families with at least one person in full-time employment.

To boast that the decline in state pensioners' income has not been quite so savage as that experienced by people in employment is less than impressive.

Yet Cameron is aware that older people are far more likely to vote than the younger generation, so he tries to con senior citizens into believing that they're not doing so badly.

Try telling that to the 10 per cent of pensioners who choose to remain in bed in a desperate effort to keep warm without further impoverishing themselves by switching on their heating.

Even as the Prime Minister plays to the gallery by pledging to retain the state pension "triple lock" - increasing it by inflation, wages or 2.5 per cent, whichever is highest - after the general election, he and his Liberal Democrat collaborators are plotting to intensify means-testing for pensioners.

Winter fuel payments, travel passes, TV licences and prescription charge exemptions will all be targeted in the name of affordability.

The arguments are spurious, questioning why famous multimillionaires should be entitled to travel freely by public transport - as though such people actually queue up to catch their local bus rather than their chauffeur-driven cars.

The history of means-tested benefits shows clearly that large numbers of people entitled to them do not claim them for a variety of reasons.

Chipping away at comprehensive benefits is part of a concerted ideological struggle to portray the welfare state, its provisions and universal free healthcare as privileges rather than entitlements.

Each time a government preaches means-testing in the name of fairness, it is society's poorest people that pay the price.

As TUC general secretary Frances O'Grady points out, "welfare cuts are hurting low-paid working families more than anyone else."

This is not a surprise to Cameron, Nick Clegg and their acolytes. The results of their policies are not some unforeseen consequence.

The government's entire project is based on slimming the state in order to cut taxation for big business and the rich while driving down the share of national income devoted to workers' pay and pensions.

Austerity programmes, whether full-blown or half-hearted, attack working people's living standards and favour the further enrichment of Britain's tiny elite.

Both government and opposition are committed to workers financing their own pensions through auto-enrolment in the private insurance industry.

This is a dead-end for most workers who are restricted by low pay from being able to save enough to finance a pension on which to live comfortably.

Decency in retirement, as in working life, depends on increasing taxation on the rich to transfer wealth and power away from the parasitic 1 per cent towards the working class and state pensioners.