The Government hopes it will get away without rescuing those people who have already lost all or most of their pension from schemes to which they were compelled to belong. The number of members now being adversely affected by a scheme’s wind-up grows almost by the day. On a number of grounds I believe the Government has misread the determination of this ever-growing disenfranchised group of voters. The pension robbed will prove a formidable notch group.

Notch groups have been defined by political scientists as groups of voters who are just on the wrong side of the line when it comes to qualifying for public benefits. Such benefits can range from the very specific, such as free double glazing for residents living very near runways, right through to the operation of the pension credit.

The near miss group of recipients in all such schemes are generally known as the notch group. They are composed of people who feel their nose has been put out of joint as they witness their neighbours, very similar to themselves, being treated more favourably.

My guess is that today’s pension robbed will prove the mother of all notch groups when it comes to levying retribution on the Government. But unlike every other notch group before them, this group is not disenfranchised because they are slightly more advantageously placed than those qualifying for a means-tested benefit. Anything but. They will be disqualified because they lost their pension before any life boat operation was launched by the Government.

When Andrew Smith announced some weeks ago that Government action would be taken to protect those of us with occupational pensions he also made clear that his raft of reforms, bar one, would not become law before 2005 at the earliest. There is a large Alice in Wonderland element in the Government’s proposals. Despite the fact that pension schemes are already crashing around our ears we are years away from seeing most of the Government’s life boat proposals becoming law.

Worse still, those employers who have maintained adequate funding of their company’s scheme will in effect be fined and made to contribute towards the pensions of workers whose employers have let their scheme slide into huge deficit. So much then for a Government that says it does not believe in extending compulsion in respect of pension provision.

The more the Government debates what it would like to do in the future, the angrier will become the notch group who know that, as far as they are concerned, the Government’s cupboard is going to remain bare. Members of the notch group will in increasing numbers berate their own MPs on the Government’s failure. Worse still, from the Government side, the best organised of robbed pensioners, the ASW workers, could become the nucleus of a national campaign for all those people who have been compelled to join their firm’s scheme as a condition of employment, only to find that they are now wickedly robbed of their pension promise.

The political terrain might then take another one of those small but significant shifts, as the country slowly girds up its loins for the next election. When the Tories announced abolishing tuition fees I felt for the first time since 1997 a small but clearly identifiable group of voters move swiftly to the other side.

The same could happen to the notch group of robbed pensioners. The Tories are looking at the proposal I have put forward to use unclaimed assets to fund the compensation scheme for those who have already been robbed.

The Government’s failure to help this already robbed group of pensioners could provide the Tories with a nice little winner. A dozen or so such moves, helping significant groups of people who now find themselves at a disadvantage, such as students or robbed pensioners, could make a very significant difference as people put their cross against their preferred candidate at the next election.