TOM UTLEY: Has this vengeful Government bought it in for me personally?

Am I being paranoid, or does this vengeful new Government have it in for me personally? I ask because I’m an OAP, I own a four-bedroom family house with a garden and I’ve built up a healthy private pension pot over almost 50 years of work.

For good measure, I belong to no legally protected minority (unless you count the elderly), I depend heavily on my car to get around, I smoke and drink too much, support Brexit and always vote Tory.

Oh, and I live just a short distance away from two of the most notorious prisons in the capital, which are disgorging serial burglars and muggers on to our south London streets as I write.

Tom Utley suggests Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves (pictured) are pushing through their most painful measures quickly, to get the worst out of the way while they can still blame the Tories

In short, Sir Keir and his Cabinet ­cronies appear to have singled me out for a hammering with just about every measure they’ve announced so far, and many more that are said to be coming in next month’s Budget.

All right, me and hundreds of thousands like me. To be fair, many will suffer even more than I, if the worst of what we’ve been told to expect comes to pass.

For instance, I won’t be affected by the plan to slap VAT on school fees, since our two oldest sons moved on from their private schools long ago. I won’t be hit by the mooted abolition of the ­single-person discount on council tax, either, since I’m married and pay the full whack anyway.

Nor am I an employer or a landlord, which means I won’t be plagued for the next five years by bloody-minded strikers and squatters, who are bound to be emboldened by Labour’s plans to extend the rights of trades unions and tenants.

But though I still work part-time at 70, earning enough to pay income tax at the higher rate, it must surely be true to say that I am not the worker Sir Keir had in mind when he swore he wouldn’t increase taxes on ‘working people’.

Then again, I suspect a great many others who work full-time will soon discover that they’re not ‘working people’ either, as defined by Sir Keir.

Of course, it could well be that we’re going through a period of expectation management – that tired old spin doctors’ trick of spreading exaggerated scare stories in advance of a Budget, in the hope that when the bad news comes, we’ll all think: ‘Ah, well, at least it’s not as dire as they warned.’

But it also seems pretty clear that Sir Keir and the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, have decided to push through their most painful measures at the earliest possible moment in their administration, so as to get the worst out of the way while they can still blame the Tories.

I therefore think it quite possible they may introduce some form of mansion tax on family homes like mine, which have shot up in value over recent ­decades because they’re in such short supply where they’re needed.

Meanwhile, it’s a certainty that they’ll tighten the thumb-screws on motorists, smokers and drinkers, pulling pious faces as they tell us it’s all for the good of the environment, our well-being and the need to protect our sacred NHS.

As for those who have saved for our retirement, you can bet your last penny that this government will grab as much from our pension pots as it possibly can.

It’s the age-old Socialist mantra: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’ Or, to put it more bluntly: ‘Take money from those who earn it, and give it to those who don’t.’

Now, we can all agree the better off should be obliged to support the needy. For this reason, as I’ve written before, I think it’s absurd that people like me, who have never needed it, should ever have received the Winter Fuel Payment.

But Ms Reeves’s decision to restrict it to those who already claim pension credit strikes me as brutally unfair to some of the most admirable people around, who need it very badly indeed.

I’m thinking of those hard-up pensioners who have saved just enough to take their income marginally over the threshold for Pension Credit, and the many others who would qualify for the payment but are so determined to remain self-sufficient that they would rather freeze than go cap-in-hand to the state.

That’s assuming they could otherwise cope with the 243 questions on the 24-page application form for Pension Credit.

Leave aside that there wasn’t a whisper of this policy in the Labour manifesto – though it must have been planned long ago, or it couldn’t have been put to that Commons vote as early as this week. Is there really no way of confiscating the payment from the likes of me, without causing untold suffering to the truly deserving at the same time?

It’s a certainty the Government will tighten the thumb-screws on motorists, smokers and drinkers, Tom Utley writes

Lord Cameron used to promise he would always stand up for those who ‘do the right thing’. OK, it was a promise he singularly failed to keep during his time at No 10, but his intentions were good.

Sir Keir and his crew, by contrast, seem deliberately set upon rewarding people who do the wrong thing, while punishing those who have always striven to avoid becoming a burden on others.

If you threaten to walk out on strike, like train drivers and junior doctors, it seems you’re guaranteed a lavish pay rise.

If a judge puts you behind bars for your umpteenth offence, don’t worry. This Government will soon let you out, to resume your life of crime.

Indeed, Labour’s Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, has even said freed prisoners should go to the front of the queue for housing, claiming implausibly that this will discourage them from reoffending.

How’s that for sending out a ­message? ‘If you want to move up the housing list, become a career criminal.’

Meanwhile, those of us who have been substantial net contributors to the Treasury all our working lives – drawing no benefits, never stealing, mugging or going on strike, saving what we can for retirement and sparing the state money by sending our children to private schools – are dismissed as the ­despicable rich, fit only to be milked for every penny we’ve earned.

It’s a wonder so many of us go on ­bothering. All of which brings me to an even greater mystery: how on Earth can Sir Keir claim to be ‘taking the brakes off Britain’, when everything he has done, or plans to do, might have been deliberately calculated to bring the country screeching to a standstill?

Does he seriously believe he can stimulate growth by jacking up taxes, wrapping businesses and landlords in yet more red tape, abolishing restrictions on the right to strike, encouraging hitherto self-reliant pensioners to apply for ­benefits, expanding our already bloated public sector and pursuing a deranged net-zero policy that will add God knows how much to energy prices?

If so, I fear that like so many Labour Prime Ministers before him, he is doomed to learn the wisdom of Margaret Thatcher’s words: ‘The problem with Socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.’

Sir Keir now tells us: ‘Things will get worse before they get better.’

All I can say with confidence is that he got those first four words right.