Investment: The great pension robbery

Scrapping the cuts to tax credits. Ring-fencing health care, and spending a few billion on a high-speed rail link from London to Birmingham. Despite all the howls of outrage from the left about austerity, for a country that was meant to be broke, we have a government that still throws around a lot of cash. Where’s it all coming from? If you have been saving for a pension, the answer is: probably from you.

Over the past few years, George Osborne has become almost as skilful as Gordon Brown was at raising taxes without anyone noticing too much. Since his early and brutal rise in VAT, a tax that hits everyone every time they shop, he has put his revenue-raising measures into the small print. The self-employed have been stung with new ways of taxing their personal service companies. Buy-to-let landlords have been hammered with changes on the way the money that they borrowed to buy their properties is treated.