RUTH SUNDERLAND: I concern Reeves will wreak irreversible hurt on our pensions – identical to her hero Gordon Brown did

The art of taxation, according to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, finance minister for Louis XIV, is to pluck from the goose the maximum number of feathers while provoking the minimum of hissing.

This is the effect Rachel Reeves is hoping to achieve if, as widely expected, she attacks ‘salary sacrifice’ pensions in the Budget. Many have never heard of salary sacrifice and find retirement finances impenetrable. So she probably thinks she can do it without unduly loud hissing.

Not if I can help it.

With salary sacrifice, employees give up part of their gross pay, which goes directly into their pension before tax and National Insurance (NI) are deducted. Employers also save on NI.

Reeves is expected to slash the annual limit on this from £60,000 to just £2,000. Employees and companies would be forced to pay NI on anything above that.

The move could raise £2 billion. But it would also be a false economy with dire long-term consequences.

Don’t just take it from me: no less a figure than Dame Amanda Blanc, boss of insurer giant Aviva, warned Reeves earlier this month it would be ‘bad news for Britain’.

As Blanc says, the message it sends is that it’s a bad idea to pay into a pension. Not great when 15 million Britons are already saving too little.

Salary sacrifice is just the latest in a series of broadsides Reeves has contemplated against pension savers trying to do the right thing. She is creating insecurity and discouraging prudence.

‘The Chancellor (pictured) appears to be fuelled by the politics of envy, where people trying to amass a nest-egg are not admired as role models but viewed as targets’

‘I fear Reeves will wreak irreversible harm to the entire pension savings system. In this, she is following in the footsteps of Gordon Brown, whose framed photograph is said to have adorned her bedroom wall when she was a student’

The chancellor appears to be fuelled by the politics of envy, where people trying to amass a nest-egg are not admired as role models but viewed as targets. Easy for Labour parliamentarians to think that way when they enjoy gold-plated pensions – along with the rest of the public sector.

Unlike those of us who work in the productive part of the economy, public sector employees are guaranteed an income for life – and are an increasingly unsustainable burden on taxpayers. Liabilities for these unfunded schemes are estimated at a staggering £1.4 trillion by the Office for Budget Responsibility.

Yet rather than tackle this scandal, Reeves takes the easy option to appease Labour’s union backers. Hitting salary sacrifice will only be another blow to companies reeling from NI rises, hikes in the minimum wage and Angela Rayner’s looming ‘workers rights’ bill.

How can we generate growth, with a chancellor who is making employers less eager to hire? With more than nine million Britons classed as ‘economically inactive’, the country cannot afford further demolition of the national work ethic.

Those hurt most by Reeves’s anti-pension vendetta will not be the old, but the young, who will be deprived of the opportunity to save in the tax and NI-friendly environment enjoyed by their elders.

I fear Reeves will wreak irreversible harm to the entire pension savings system. In this, she is following in the footsteps of Gordon Brown, whose framed photograph is said to have adorned her bedroom wall when she was a student.

His £5 billion-a-year tax raid on pension fund dividends in 1997 was a major reason for the collapse of final salary schemes in the private sector. Reeves seems determined to emulate her unlikely pin-up boy.

By snatching the pension savings of middle Britain, she will deplete a pool of capital that could be used to finance infrastructure and innovation.

And by pick-pocketing future generations of pensioners, she is storing up even larger welfare costs in decades to come, as those who are unable to save enough to fend for themselves turn to the state.

To return to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, in her assaults on pensions, Reeves is not merely plucking feathers, she is killing the goose that lays the golden egg.