In Julian Barnes’s novel Staring at the Sun, the elderly become so furious with their lot that they form a protest movement, complete with martyrdoms in St Paul’s and outside Buckingham Palace. Their demands include: the closure of all old people’s homes; the elimination of “the word geriatric and its cognates from official use”; “old people are in future to be loved more”; the “creation of an Old People’s Day, to be celebrated once a year”; and “positive discrimination in jobs and housing in favour of old people”.

Twenty-six years after Barnes’s novel was published, reality is catching up with satire. Yesterday it was reported that the National Pensioners’ Convention is backing an e-petition challenging George Osborne to scrap the so-called “granny tax” announced in Wednesday’s Budget. The phasing out of age-related allowances was always bound to be contentious, and pensioners are famously good at mobilising opposition to such measures, and adept at harnessing the newest technology to their cause. In his memoirs, Nigel Lawson reflects that the invention of the word processor, and the consequent increase in protest mail, made it much harder to drive through measures such as the taxation of pension lump sums in the mid-Eighties. In 2012, e-petitions, Twitter and other social media are the weapons of choice.

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