STAR-MER’S GOLD-PLATED PENSION – BY LAW!
While yours is cut, frozen and forgotten: Starmer’s pension is guaranteed by law, millions lose Winter Fuel Payment, and the UK state pension limps at £11,500 a year v £23,000 in Spain.
Starmer’s Pension: Protected by Law. Yours? Forget It
Keir Starmer has a pension literally written into law. Not a metaphor. A statutory instrument called “The Pension Scheme for Keir Starmer QC Regulations 2013.”
If you’re a normal punter who’s worked forty years, paid your National Insurance, and hopes the state pension stretches far enough for heating and a pint, that sounds like the very definition of one rule for them, another for us.
Now, let’s be fair. The law wasn’t drafted to slip Sir Keir a personal perk. It’s a quirk of Whitehall. The Director of Public Prosecutions, the job Starmer held from 2008 to 2013, isn’t in the civil service scheme and isn’t a judge either. It sits in a grey zone. So when a DPP leaves, the Treasury has to tidy up their pension with a one-off law to uprate it with inflation. They did it for David Calvert-Smith in 2003, for Ken Macdonald in 2007, and for Keir Starmer in 2013.
Housekeeping. Dull. Bureaucratic.
But politics is never about the footnotes. It’s about the optics. And the optics are brutal: his pension is nailed down by statute; yours isn’t.
Pensioner Kicking
At the very moment this obscure regulation has bubbled into the headlines, Starmer’s government has been busy giving Britain’s pensioners a good kicking.
Take the Winter Fuel Payment. It used to be universal — every pensioner got it. Then Rachel Reeves, with Starmer’s full backing, means-tested it. Overnight, ten million pensioners lost it.
Charities screamed. Unions complained. MPs grumbled. But Labour stuck to the line: Britain is broke, the money has to be targeted. It may make sense on a Treasury spreadsheet. It doesn’t make sense to the couple sat in a cold semi in Dudley wondering why their heating is suddenly classed as a luxury.
Add in the WASPI row — millions of women who saw their pension age rise without warning, now fobbed off with little more than sympathy. Add the quiet cuts to benefits that also hit older people. Then remember the Prime Minister has his own pension uprating locked in by law. You don’t need to be a Tory spin doctor to see how the attack writes itself.
And the timing could hardly be worse. Just this week, headlines trumpeted that the state pension will rise by 4.7% in April 2026 under the so-called triple lock — a technical win for ministers, but one that still leaves millions feeling short-changed when set against soaring energy bills, rents, and food prices. At the same time, a new survey revealed that over half of UK adults are unaware of the pension changes coming down the track: higher pension ages, shrinking entitlements, and tougher tax rules.
For a country where the state pension is already among the most miserly in the developed world, the numbers tell their own story. In Britain, the full state pension is worth about £11,500 a year — barely 30% of average earnings. In Spain or Italy, state pensions replace 60–70% of average pay. If Britain matched that, pensioners here would be on £23,000 to £26,000 a year. That’s a shortfall of more than £10,000 a year for millions of people who worked and paid in all their lives.
Put bluntly: while Keir Starmer has a pension uprated by statute, millions of ordinary Britons don’t even know the ground beneath them is shifting.
Competent but Not Loved
Starmer’s problem isn’t just the policy. It’s his standing in the country.
He didn’t win power on a wave of love. He got fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn, such is the oddness of Britain’s electoral system. Voters were knackered after fourteen years of Tory chaos. They wanted someone who looked steady, serious, maybe even a bit dull. Starmer fit the bill.
But that doesn’t give you much credit in the bank. His personal ratings are middling at best. Respect, yes. Enthusiasm, no. And older voters — the ones most likely to actually turn out — are the ones most spooked by losing their perks.
So when they read about “The Pension Scheme for Keir Starmer QC,” what they hear is: his pension’s safe, yours is not.
Labour MPs Nervous
Inside the Labour Party, the nerves are showing. Backbench MPs in marginal seats hate the winter fuel decision. They see the parallels with Theresa May’s “dementia tax” in 2017 — a policy that looked clever in Whitehall but toxic on the doorstep.
Even usually loyal MPs mutter that the optics are horrendous. You can almost hear the Tory leaflets writing themselves: “Labour cuts your pension support while Starmer’s is protected by law.”
Reeves bangs the drum for fiscal discipline. Starmer insists Britain can’t spend what it can’t afford. Fair enough. But Labour MPs remember what happened last time a government took pensioners for granted: a landslide majority can start to crumble.
The Bigger Pattern
The row over pensions fits a bigger pattern with Starmer. He chooses technocratic fixes that look fine to the Treasury but terrible in the newspapers. Planning reform. Benefit cuts. Pension tinkering. Each one looks like a case of competence first, politics second.
But politics is never second. It’s the whole game. And the game here is cruelly simple: Keir Starmer’s pension is protected by statute. Millions of ordinary pensioners are not.
The Balanced Truth
Strip away the spin, and the truth is this:
The DPP pension law wasn’t a bespoke favour for Starmer. His predecessors had the same.
The winter fuel cut does save money and target support where it’s most needed.
Pension reforms that unlock corporate surpluses could help investment and growth.
But in politics, balance doesn’t count for much. Voters rarely dig into explanatory memoranda or statutory instruments. They remember the headline. And the headline here is devastating.
Conclusion
Starmer is not the first Prime Minister to be tripped up by pensions. He won’t be the last. But this is a uniquely damaging combination: a pension law with his name on it, and a set of policies that leave millions of pensioners worse off.
For a leader respected for competence but not loved for charisma, it’s dangerous territory. Among voters, the line “Starmer’s pension is protected, yours isn’t” sticks. Among Labour MPs, the fear is growing that this government is walking into the same trap that has swallowed so many before it: clever in Whitehall, toxic in Wolverhampton.
Starmer’s pension law was dull housekeeping. But in politics, optics are everything. And right now the optics look like a Prime Minister with his retirement sewn up in statute — while he gives pensioners a kicking.