Can it be right that British taxpayers are giving pensions to foreigners who live abroad and have never paid UK tax or once set foot in this country? The answer is so obviously “no” that you wonder why the question is being asked.

Welfare minister Steve Webb says 220,000 people living overseas get pensions based solely on their spouse’s NI contributions — something called the Married Couple’s Allowance (HMRC’s website says it’s a tax break, not a handout, but heigh ho). This, he sort of thunders, is to be stamped out.

Jolly good. But surely getting a pension when you’ve never paid NI is the problem — not the idea you might do so and live abroad. The minority of claimants who are a) foreign citizens b) live abroad c) have never paid UK tax or d) set foot here, incidentally, seems to be a theoretical one.

So why are we hearing about this at the top of the news? Well, if you’re serious about making a dent in the welfare bill, sticking it to the disabled and the long-term unemployed — the low-hanging fruit, politically speaking — only gets you so far. Pensions make up nearly half the total welfare bill: six times the Disability Living Allowance and about 15 times what we spend on Jobseeker’s Allowance. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to clobber the oldies.

Problem is, we like to see pensioners as floss-haired old dears with hankies up their sleeves, or proud old men with enormous ears who did their bit in the war. We feel warm towards them. Also, there are lots of them, and they vote. So the category foreign-dwelling spouses of British citizens who have never set foot in the UK or paid tax yet claim a pension, the cheeky bastards, represents a toenail-paring of the overall bill. But it establishes the concept of a divide between deserving and undeserving pensioners — which is ever how welfare reform was sold.

Why be coy? If we’re to believe a significant number of welfare recipients are no-good spongers, it follows naturally that a significant number of pensioners are the same: retiring from unemployment at 65 to squander more unearned handouts, disgustingly, on bingo, Fray Bentos tinned pies, central heating and dialysis.

As for domicile, common sense tells us that if you’re entitled to a UK pension after a lifetime paying tax here, your entitlement shouldn’t evaporate if you retire abroad. Given we spend half our time moaning about the difficulty of preventing able-bodied people from overseas coming here to work, it seems positively perverse to insist the elderly be prevented from leaving.

If anything, the sensible policy would be to say that pensioners could “only” receive their pensions on condition they move overseas. Imagine the NHS’s sigh of relief! Imagine all that housing stock freed up! I can foresee some difficulty in selling the policy, mind, but I reckon Webb’s our man.

The worm in Eden’s bud unfurls

On Bank Holiday Monday I took the family to what, on a sunny day, is surely the prime glory of our city: Kew Gardens. The fat buds of magnolia exploding excellently into bloom! The clouds of cherry blossom! The astonishing queues for ice lollies! Very heaven it was. Then, on returning, I saw an item in the paper reporting that Kew is battling an infestation of the oak processionary moth, a vile pest that poisons humans and kills trees. It cast a retrospective chill: the worm in Eden.

The weekend has been like that. I did slow-roast pork belly for lunch on Sunday, and noticed something disconcerting when I unwrapped the bag from the butcher’s. I told my guests that their lunch had had nipples; but only after they’d finished eating. Their faces! It feels like an analogy, somehow.

Dame Helen’s peaceful protest lesson

If it were possible to love Helen Mirren any more, I do. After the first half of a play she was in was interrupted by 25 street drummers promoting a gay and transgender festival outside the stage door in Rupert Street, she bolted out in the interval — dressed, obviously, as HM The Queen — and told them in what she calls “thespian words” to knock it off.

No hard feelings obtained. The drummers found it hilarious, and Dame Helen speaks of inviting them to see the show by way of apology. I wish I had her style. I hate that whenever anybody wants to protest an injustice or celebrate an identity — or, for that matter, publicise a party — they have to make such a racket. The older I get the more the operative words in “peaceful assembly”, “peaceful protest” and “peaceful demonstration” seem to me to be the first.

It’s right to pay Kenyan victims of UK torture

News that Kenyans tortured during the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s are to be compensated by the British Government seems to me to be an unalloyed good. Thin-end-of-the-wedgers will hum and haw, and the usual arguments about unstirring the jam from semolina, apologising for a previous generation’s doings, compensating the great-great-grandchildren of slaves etc will likely be raised. But this is living memory, and these are living people whom we know to have been tortured by the British state. It’s not enough to say let bygones be bygones.