LAST year, a Government think-tank put forward an idea on how to solve the so-called pensions crisis.

It was this. At some stage in the future, people would have to continue working until the age of 70 if they were going to be able to enjoy anything remotely like a satisfactory retirement.

Brilliant. I think that if anything could be said to illustrate the light years that divide this country's governors and the governed, then it was this astounding piece of barmy quango-logic.

Just imagine. The labourers and contractors on building sites, roadsides, working in all weathers, freezing in January and sweating in July... plodding on until they were 70.

Just imagine. The teachers, office workers and hospital staff, facing all the stress of deadlines, ridiculous bosses and professional memo writers... plodding on until they were 70.

Lunacy. But worst of all was this think-tank's crass ignorance of the realities faced by ordinary people who have nothing to sell but their skills.

The problem I have with the plonkers who dream up such crackpot notions is not just that they are always funded by the victims - the taxpayers - but also the callous indifference such individuals have towards their fellow citizens.

For example, there is never any acknowledgement that the ravages of continuous employment - skeletal conditions, declining eyesight, declining everything - mean that few, if any people are fit enough to work really effectively past 65.

Not so for our MPs, though. They live in centrally-heated rooms, enjoy subsidised canteens, free travel, business trips and any number of perks and concessions.

Their retirement is guaranteed by the taxpayer should they fail to be elected at any stage - and then there are the ripe plums of outside jobs ready to be plucked from the laden branches of limitless opportunity.

Tories end up in non-executive directorships or The City. Deluded Labour MPs who think they are Oscar Wilde retire to dusty studies and scribble murderously boring drivel for national publications.

I'm not sure what Liberal-Democrats do when they go to the donkey sanctuary. Maybe they are like old soldiers and just fade away.

However, all this junketing might be just about forgiveable if it wasn't for the sheer unfairness of the whole thing. And there is no greater personification of this selfishness than the pensions system.

But while MPs and civil servants have no fears whatsoever about their futures, the outlook for the rest of us is not quite so rosy.

Occupational pensions are in trouble, many private schemes have proved unsatisfactory if not completely dodgy, and the State pension is now no more than a safety net.

Anyway, you can kick a dog when it's down, but there is always that risk of the old mutt turning and giving its tormentors a good bite up the backside.

And that's exactly what's happening. Right now.

For furious pensioners are creating their own political party in a bid to kick ministers out at the next General Election. Their plans come after they learnt that they are to be robbed of more than £1bn a year for the next 20 years.

The Grey Power army first wants to hit Labour by running for local and county elections over the coming months.

Their top target is Pensions Minister Malcolm Wicks, whom they blame for not helping them out of poverty in retirement. And they hope to make their point at the General Election.

Pensioners' anger has been further inflamed by the revelations - in a national newspaper - that Gordon Brown has abandoned a Labour manifesto commitment to let pensioners share in the rising prosperity of the nation.

The paper claimed that Mr Brown is to drop a key manifesto pledge to pensioners. Labour's 1997 and 2001 manifestos promised pensioners would share in the country's increasing wealth. Currently, pensioners receive a five per cent slice each year from national coffers.

But, according to reports, the Treasury has now admitted that it will drop to 4.9 per cent by 2022.

In today's money, that sort of reduction is the equivalent of removing £1bn from pensioners - worth about £100 a year to each of them.

And the gap between the retired and the working population will widen still further as the State pension, the Christmas bonus, the free TV licence, and the much-trumpeted Pension Credit inevitably come under pressure.

This little gem was hidden away in last month's pre-Budget report that Labour intends to put less into funding pensions for the next two decades just as the number of pensioners is predicted to rise by more than 1.5 million.

All this means trouble for New Labour. And it's trouble in the shape of the National Pensioners Convention whose members are poised to unseat Labour councillors and then sweep into the Houses of Parliament itself.

Already, a suitable candidate is being selected to fight the Croydon North seat held by Mr Wicks. Rodney Bickerstaffe, president of the Convention said pensioners were coming "to the end of their lives and the end of their tether."

He added: "Plenty of them are willing to run for election both at council level and in the next election. Unless the Government gets a grip, there will be electoral consequences and more protests."

Mr Bickerstaffe hopes to emulate the success of the only independent MP, Dr Richard Taylor, who overturned a huge Labour majority in 2001 to win Worcestershire's Wyre Forest seat on a platform of defending Kidderminster Hospital from downgrading.

The parallels soon become obvious when it is remembered that Mr Taylor trounced the hapless David Locke, then a Government Minister. Talk about Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall.

The NPC is currently working on its own manifesto. It will be sent to the main parties this year, with leading politicians being asked to give their public backing.

The over-65s are already angry over high council tax bills and are calling for the restoration of the link between pensions and average earnings, rather than the £77.45 weekly pittance.

That policy, which is already backed by the Tories, is set to become the centrepiece of the election campaign.

More than 50 pensioners are also planning to stand in the Devon County Council elections in 2005. The campaign is being planned by the Devon Pensioners' Action Group, which took a stand against council tax rises earlier this year.

The Scottish Parliament already has its own Grey Power MP. John Swinburne, aged 72, was elected last May.

It seems to me that politicians of all the major parties now have some exceedingly stark choices. Either they accept that all the people of this country have the right to retire at a reasonable age, and live in dignity without hardship, or they don't.

If the answer agrees that they do, then conventional politics will begin to restore the credibility they so crave. But if our rulers think that the electorate will sit by as a never-ending Iraq War sucks cash from a bottomless purse, while the people contemplate their twilight years in penury, then there will be some surprises in store.

For after Wyre Forest, anything could happen. That momentous victory for people-power was a clarion call from the streets, true echoes of a tradition that goes back to the days of the Diggers, Chartists and Levellers.

The Grey Army is on the march.