Rachel Reeves to target pensioners in Budget - by pretending their hard work was just luck

Homeowners and families should be worried too. Labour plans to hit them with new wealth taxes, and they won't have to be super-rich to pay. Worst of all, the onslaught is built on a lie.

Decades of working, saving, and paying off mortgages now count for nothing on the left. Instead, millions will be punished for it on November 26, as Labour pretends their homes, pensions and security aren't the result of hard work at all. It's purely down to luck.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves is under pressure to raise £30billion to £40billion in extra taxes to fund her spending blitz. Across the left, there are calls for a raid on wealth to fund Labour's spending plans.

Today it's the turn of left-leaning think tank the Resolution Foundation, an organisation that has embedded itself in the Treasury.

Torsten Bell, who ran the foundation for a decade, is now Labour's pensions minister and is writing the Budget for Reeves. Two other former Resolution Foundation staff will directly advise PM Keir Starmer on its contents.

The Resolution Foundation has somehow survived Bell's departure and continues to pump out its tax demands ahead of the Budget. Today's report should terrify anyone with a little wealth to their name.

It warns that gaps between richer and poorer households have widened over the last 15 years, which is a genuine concern. But it then draws some very dodgy conclusions.

The obvious solution would be better education, more homes, getting young people into work, and encouraging investment so they can build wealth themselves.

But that's not Labour's approach. Instead, the left plans to tax those who've done well, as if that will magically lift others. It won't.

The Resolution Foundation's senior economist, Molly Broome, claims rising pensions and house prices account for most wealth gap. Her conclusion? Britain needs new and higher wealth taxes "to fall on pensioners, southern homeowners or their families".

Now here's the lie. Broome claims the increase in household wealth "has come from passive gains, such as rising house prices, rather than active behaviour on the part of households".

The message is that decades of saving and property ownership don't count as effort. People haven't worked for their wealth. Effectively, it's unearned.

Which means they have no right to complain if Labour taxes it. Hard.

By the way, don't be misled by talk of taxes on "wealth". There aren't enough super-rich Brits to plug Reeves's Budget shortfall, and many will flee overseas if she tries.

Instead, the burden will fall on ordinary pensioners, families and homeowners who've saved sensibly over a lifetime.

And don't believe that rot about "passive" gains either. Yes, pensioners have benefited from rising house prices.

But saving for a deposit, paying a mortgage, and maintaining a home for decades is hard work, as my simple sums show.

Consider a £250,000 home bought with a £200,000 mortgage at 5% over 30 years. Now imagine it's worth £500,000 today.

Is its owner sitting on a £250,000 profit? Of course not. Over that time, they will have paid £186,512 worth of interest. Add in the deposit and capital, and the total bill hits £436,500.

That cuts the net gain is just £63,500, but even that that's misleading. Once adjusted for decades of inflation, they'll have made a real terms loss.

And that's before accounting for years of repairs, maintenance, upgrades, council tax, VAT, and other costs. That's anything but passive. It's bloody hard work.

The same applies to pensions. Every pound comes from taxed income, saved over decades, its real value eroded by inflation. This is hard-left political spin dressed up as economics.

When Reeves hits pensioners again, they'll pay for decades of effort under the guise of fairness. It won't close the wealth gap. It will simply make ordinary people poorer, while doing nothing to improve life chances for those left behind. And it will be based on an outright lie.