No wonder we didn’t know our pensions had been stolen with insulting, patronising adverts like this...

Our state pension age is changing Babs and I’m not sure how we’ll be affected

Relax Wendy. There’s a guide that tells you aboutit

No surprise there were emotional scenes outside the High Court in London yesterday, when the Women Against state pension inequality ( WAspi) lost their case against the Government.

They had been campaigning against what they see as unfair changes to the state pension Age imposed on women born in the 1950s as the age they receive their pensions rises from 60 to 65, in line with men.

An estimated 3.8 million women are affected, and some will lose £50,000.

Now, unless there is an appeal, there is no chance they will be compensated for that putative loss.

Many other people apart from the court have dismissed their case. You wanted equality, they say. This is what you get.

While no one disputes that the law has to be equalised, it is the way it has been implemented that is so awful.

Never before has one great, national issue affecting so many members of the public been hush-hushed up and brush-brushed under a carpet of confusion. And the acceleration ver the past few years seems particularly unfair.

The 2011 pensions Act hastened the increase in the state pension age from 63 to 65 for women between 2016 and 2018. Many of that number would have made plans, left jobs, shaped a retirement and a post-work life, only to have it dashed from under their pipe and slippers.

Declaration. i am exactly the WAspi demographic, but like many non-WAspi women, i knew this change was coming. of course i did. i work in the media and am still in full-time employment.

Good for me, well-read, with a comfortable life cushioned from the blows.

From the 1990s onwards, i just expected not to get my pension until i was 65, and planned accordingly.

But other women haven’t been so lucky. And they have a case.

Fora start, the Government’s awareness campaign to warn about the rise in the state pension age was an utter joke. Around the year 2000, millions of pounds were spent on a series of baffling newspaper and magazine advertisements, many featuring Monopoly boards and cryptic messages (iron it out Now.) What?

Another featured two Labrador dogs called Wendy and Babs, parked on their bums on a beach, with speech bubbles coming out of their mouths. relax, they told each other, they would get a pamphlet in the post that would explain it all.

so insulting! Not to mention deeply patronising.

if men had been the target of these ads, there would have been macho, great glaciers crumbling into a roaring sea with ACT NoW in massive red letters branded onto the ice. There would have been an ancient, whiskery caveman still looking oddly hot, his bearskin toga holding an empty porridge bowl and a voiceover saying ‘Don’t Be This Man’. And they would have been run endlessly across all media.

What did we get? A polite cough, an obscure message and ads bearing the bad news buried in the back of Woman magazine. We got childish board games and a lot of woof.

ignorance is no defence in law, but what if you worked on a farm in West Wales or were too busy to notice the faint glimmers of information and thought your pension would come along at 60, like your mother’s did?

That you had paid into the system all your life and just assumed that the system would be there for you when you needed it?

We were all supposed to get a leaflet — a leaflet, praise be! — informing us of the changes, but i don’t recall ever receiving one.

You have to agree that the WAspi women have had rotten luck. They were born at the wrong time, into the wrong age, shaded by the wrong values.

For most of their working lives, they were toiling in the dark ages of untrammelled gender discrimination, in a society that put men first.

in terms of pay, a huge number were treated as second-class citizens. A lot were bumped out of company pension schemes when they went part-time to bring up children.

And now, as the sun sets on their careers and jobs, the Government is finally agreeing that they are equal to men at last — but tragically not in a way that benefits them. surely they deserve some help.