I find it amazing that it has taken 10 years for the penny to drop and for a realisation of how much damage Gordon Brown has caused for pensioners by his plundering of company pension funds. Thousands of pensioners have been deprived of the income they should, and would, have received on retirement had it not been for the callous indifference of Gordon Brown, who, now that he has been rumbled, tries to pretend that others were partly to blame for the fiasco which he and he alone brought about.

Of course, David Cameron is making the most of Brown's discomfort but we should not be quick to assume that a future government under his leadership would do any better than his predecessors.

On April 12, 2005, The Herald carried a letter from me in which I deplored the apparent indifference of the Conservatives to the plight of pensioners. At that time, the shadow work and pensions minister, David Willetts MP, had issued a report on his party's attitude to savings and pensions. Nowhere did he suggest that a future Conservative government would undo Brown's plundering.

There is no evidence that thinking in the Conservative camp has changed. In March 2006, Boris Johnson MP was speaking in Ayr and was challenged on the subject of pension taxation. This appeared to cause him some embarrassment and all he could say was that he was not the shadow Chancellor and couldn't be definite, but in view of the large sums which such taxation produced, it seemed difficult to see how it could be given up.

Now that pensioners have at last woken up to the facts, the spotlight is on David Cameron. Conservative candidates in the coming Scottish elections will be watching him with bated breath. I fear they may be disappointed. - Dr James T Farquhar, Sunnyside, Barr, Ayrshire.