Labour will find increases in the state pension age are unacceptable, just as cuts to the Winter Fuel Allowance, personal independence payments and universal credit are — it needs to change direction immediately, writes PCS general secretary FRAN HEATHCOTE

POLITICAL life throws up plenty of new problems. It also regularly resurrects some perennial ones.
Reader, let us return to 1950. Labour had just been returned to office, but with a majority dramatically diminished from its 1945 landslide after abandoning domestic radicalism in favour of waging the cold war.
The 1950 election had also seen the Communist Party lose what has so far proved to be its last two MPs. The 100 candidates the party presented at the polls secured, in an atmosphere of cold war vituperation, fewer votes than 21 communists had won five years earlier.