𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

If you thought Rachel Reeves’ first Budget was a horror show, the upcoming sequel promises to be far more terrifying. This time around she has a sidekick and, while our Chancellor may be hapless, her new partner in crime is chilling. Torsten Bell has been picked to help write the new tax and spend plan and nothing you own or have saved is safe from his tax-grasping hands. A Treasury minister despite only having been elected for the first time last year, the Chancellor has turned to him because he has one of Labour’s “sharpest minds”.

Which is enough to worry any seasoned Westminster watcher. “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them,” as Orwell said. Apparently Bell himself is not shy about spreading the news of his giant intellect, with colleagues once cattily briefing that “he never tires of telling us how ferociously clever he is”.

Being top of the class is great if you want to be a learned professor, but politics is about understanding people. Bell is tetchy in interviews, seemingly annoyed journalists are not clever enough to understand his very clever answers.

It’s not the worst offence, and he is far from the first bright spark in politics to be impatient with those they consider their inferiors. But his interviews display a distinct lack of empathy about the impact Government changes have on ordinary people.

Bell, whose twin brother Olaf is a senior civil servant, has never worked in the private sector. After reading PPE at Oxford he became a special adviser to Alistair Darling when he was chancellor.

Recruited by Ed Miliband when he was Labour leader, Bell’s main claim to fame during his stint as director of public policy was to come up with the widely-mocked “Ed Stone”.

The party’s manifesto pledges were carved on the 8ft stone tablet in an attempt to show how committed they were to keeping them. It looked more like a tombstone and it became one of the defining images of the 2015 election.

After Miliband’s resounding defeat, Bell went off to work for the Resolution Foundation, where he has spent years devising policy proposals that have left no Ed Stone unturned when it comes to innovative ways to tax anyone who has ever managed to put money away for a rainy day or their retirement.

He hates the triple lock and was a vocal advocate for scrapping it, but he also wants to go after private pensions too, reducing the relief on contributions and lowering the tax free lump sum limit.

Attacking private provision as well as state payouts shows quite a contempt for older people. He called for capping tax-free ISAS at £100,000 and also wanted to drag more businesses into VAT registration.

More generally, he wants higher taxes overall, explaining: “Most people like me, who come at the tax system from either a technocratic or an economics perspective, would like to see a straightforward rise in income tax, [and a rise in tax on] capital gains and dividends across the board.”

These policies are, of course, all from his days at a think tank rather than his time in government but they show Bell’s tax hiking instincts and loathing of the aspirational classes.

And, surprise surprise, as soon as it emerged he had been made the key Budget brain, it was briefed that a brand new tax could be imposed on landlords.

It would mean national insurance would be applied to rental income for the first time with the aim of raising £2billion. The option was proposed ahead of the first budget by the Resolution Foundation that Bell previously ran.

Location, Location, Location presenter Kirstie Allsopp was horrified, warning the latest proposed attack on landlords would mean tenants ended up with higher rents.

Constantly floating new taxes is causing great instability, the property expert said, telling Times Radio: “It’s literally like having the economy run by Baldrick. She [Rachel Reeves] keeps on coming up with cunning plans and she needs to go and sit in a corner and think about how to save money and improve the economy, not constantly be taking money from people because this will impact tenants.”

But this is no comedy show. Reeves promised growth and a fully-costed manifesto, not an all-out assault on strivers. With Torsten on board, the Bell truly has tolled for middle-class aspirations of a comfy retirement.