THERE are times when you really couldn’t make it up.

In equalising the state pension age the Westminster Tories have managed to penalise up to 700,000 women born in the 1950s.

It all started with the 1995 Pensions Act that aimed to make the retirement age 65 for both men and women by 2020. The argument was that increased life expectancy justified the shift. Then the 2011 Pensions Act changed the age to 66 and sped up the process, despite little evidence that we had suddenly started living longer in those 16 years, or the 2010 promise from the Tories and LibDems that the changes for women would not take place before that original 2020 date.

Just one more Westminster promise broken and one more policy shift that had a lot more to do with reining in public spending than anything else.

Now it is becoming increasingly clear that it is women born in the 1950s, and particularly in 1953 and 1954, who will bear the brunt of a looming change the Westminster government did little to tell them about. The UK Government adverts are now everywhere you look of course but for most it is too little, way too late. And, in truth, this is about a great deal more than poor communication.

The women involved grew up, as I did, with the belief that you were part of a two-way deal with government. Our responsibility was to pay our taxes and national insurance and, in return, government would invest in public services, provide support for your vulnerable family or neighbours, ensure the health service was accessible and free when you needed it and, when your working days were over, return to you a state pension of a modest, but liveable, amount.

In 2013, the truth came out. For Osborne and the Tories these state pension age changes are a source of delight because they save so much money. Yet another example of those least responsible being forced to pay for the proliferation of riches for the few and the mad casino gambling of minimally regulated banks that successive Tory and Labour governments foisted upon us.

So what of those women born in the 1950s? Until a few years ago they expected to receive their state pension when they hit 60, but they now find a quite arbitrary imposition of apparently random differences in when that meagre state pension will arrive. Random because not content with simply picking on those born in 1953 and 1954, when they qualify will also depend on the date and month of their birth.

If you were born in 1953 between January 1 and March 5, your state pension will arrive when you are 62, but if your birth was between November 6 and 31 December, you’ll have to wait until you’re 65. So, in the Westminster parallel universe, eight months younger justifies another three years of waiting before what you paid in is returned to you. And a great deal sooner than the promise of “no impact’ before 2020.

These women grew up in a time when finding full-time work and raising a family were even harder than it is now. Childcare was scarce and, in any event, you weren’t expected to work full-time unless you were one of those rare “career girl” types. Most worked part-time and still do and we know, whether in full- or part-time work, they work for low pay and in far, far too many cases for lower pay than their male colleagues. The chances of building up a private pension pot, never mind savings, were as rare as a rainless Glasgow day.

And the recent increase in the wage trigger to £10,000, which secures automatic pension enrolment, additionally penalises women in part-time work and the many women who work more than one part-time job to make ends meet.

So despite more than 40 years of an equal pay act that is not enforced and after decades of fighting for the equality that is a basic human right, we are reminded yet again that the Tory idea of equality is, in truth, simply more inequality.

And to add insult to yet another injury, on Wednesday this week the former LibDem pensions minister, Steve Webb, admitted they made “a bad decision” but blamed it on being “inadequately briefed”: the get-out clause of “it wisnae me”… Presumably a big boy did it and ran away. And presumably no one in the UK Government cares about running an equality impact assessment on policy proposals, or the benefits to everyone from gender-based budgeting that our Scottish Government has embraced.

The anxiety and additional financial worry these women now face is nothing to do with poor communication, but everything to do with Tory ideology that takes from those with the least and re-engineers our public-service landscape so there will be even less for the hard work, enterprise, effort and taxes we contribute. Equality? Not a word the Tories understand. Or a goal they care about.