Last October, I wrote a half-serious apology to readers. I said I’d been wrong to encourage people to save, invest and put money aside for the future. The reason? PM Sir Keir Starmer had just redefined what it means to be a “working person”, and it was terrifying.

He labelled a working person is someone who earns a living but does not have the ability to “write a cheque to get out of difficulties”. The definition was old-fashioned even then. Nobody writes cheques these days, except maybe Labour donors, but the message was clear.

If you had a spot of money in the bank, enough to draw a cheque on, you no longer qualified as “working people”. You were fair game.

Ten months later, the implications are brutally clear. Anyone with even modest assets has been lined up for attack.

In her last Budget, Rachel Reeves hiked capital gains tax (to be fair, Tory predecessor Jeremy Hunt showed her the way) and slapped inheritance tax on unused pensions.

This autumn she’ll be back for more. Labour MPs won’t allow her to cut public spending. Her only option is to squeeze more tax from the middle class. That’s their reward for doing everything I’d been urging them to do for more than three decades as a finance journalist: save, invest, take out a mortgage and buy a home.

How wrong I was.

Reeves will dress these raids up as taxes on the rich. The left is pushing like crazy for a wealth tax on those worth more than £10million, thinking it will fix all our fiscal woes.

It’s easy to see why a wealth tax would be popular. Most of us have nowhere near £10million. I certainly don’t.

But wealth taxes are fiendishly complicated and could take years to deliver a penny. Its backers claim the wealthy won’t flee but many already have.

Even if one did materialise, it wouldn’t plug Labour’s fiscal black hole.

There aren’t enough billionaires to make the sums work. There are, however, millions of middle-class households with pensions, savings and homes to target. They won’t flee the UK, or employ cunning tax advisers to hide their wealth, so they’re the ones who’ll get hit.

Already the rumours are flying. Inheritances, pensions, ISAs and now even our family homes are in her sights. Our main residences have always been considered out of bounds for the Treasury. No longer.

Once Labour starts taxing our homes, it won’t be able to stop. Every year, they’ll suck more money out of them.

Yes, you have to be reasonably well off to have these – but isn’t that the point? Are we really creating a society where building moderate wealth is a vice? It feels like it.

The message could not be starker. If you work hard, live modestly and save diligently, the reward is not security but punishment. Basically, you’re a Treasury cash cow.

Wealth-building is no overnight trick. It takes decades of thrift. Every pound saved is a pound not spent in the pub, on holidays or on fashionable gadgets. It ought to be celebrated.

Instead, Labour recasts restraint as greed. The virtues of prudence and hard work are mocked, then taxed away.

Anybody with a home worth more than £500,000 is now on the radar, and as prices rise, more will be dragged in. That sends a chilling signal. Why save in a pension? Why trade up to a better house? Why try to leave money to your children?

These are normal human aspirations. Labour sees them as morally dubious, and fiscally irresistible. For more than 25 years I’ve been telling people to save, invest and pass it on. My advice today? Just write a cheque to Rachel Reeves.