This week, 17.5 million people on various benefits including the state pension and disability living allowance will receive a £10 Christmas bonus . It’s about time though, that Keir Starmer played Scrooge and finally abolished the bonus altogether. For unlike their Dickensian forebears, poor pensioners this Christmas won’t be going without food or warmth. In fact, they have more than enough of both.

When the Christmas bonus was introduced by the Tory minister Keith Joseph over 50 years ago, the basic argument was that pensioners needed the money to cope with that year’s soaring inflation of 7.2 per cent. Although believing £10 did not go far enough, the Labour politician Barbara Castle supported it, remarking that ‘many old-age pensioners and others this winter will be desperate – despe

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