Spiteful attacks against pensioners. A blow to business. This budget will be a vengeful horror show, says JEFF PRESTRIDGE

It is almost three months since Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves stood up in the House of Commons and said winter fuel payments should be means-tested for the financial good of the country.

What absolute nonsense. It was nothing more than a spiteful attack on pensioners that will forever stain his record in public service.

Since then, Reeves has remained silent in the background, ignoring sincere requests for a U-turn, while allowing his Treasury officials to perpetuate the view that Wednesday’s Budget will be the cruelest in living memory.

Some £35bn in extra tax is coming at us like a financial tornado. These taxes will make it much more difficult for households to accumulate wealth and then access it or leave some of it to loved ones. There are likely to be tax attacks on our pensions, share portfolios and our right to make gifts (thus mitigating inheritance tax bills). And much more besides.

The raid will also include taxes on businesses, the lifeblood of our economy. Some of these taxes – notably a National Insurance charge on the contributions employers pay to their workers’ pension funds – will be deeply damaging and divisive.

Divisive in the sense that public sector employers will be exempt from this tax, thus protecting their employees’ golden pensions. Detrimental to those of us who work hard in the private sector, as employers may respond to the increase by cutting the generosity of our pension arrangements.

The Budget is going to be a horror show of Frankensteinian proportions. For those of you with delicate constitutions, I advise you not to watch it. Instead, read Money Mail’s forensic examination of all its gory details on Thursday and for a few days afterward. And, of course, absorb what Wealth and Personal Finance has to say next week.

We will do everything we can to help you mitigate the impact of whatever Reeves brings to you.

Will the vinyl feature WHSmith on the song?

WHSmith is a chameleon brand. Its high street branches look tired, even sold out, compared to its shiny must-have stores in British airports.

But perhaps the return of vinyl to some of its stores in our battered urban centers will act as a catalyst for an overall resurgence of the retailer’s brand. I hope so.

For much of the late 1970s and 1980s, you couldn’t walk past a WHSmith (or, for that matter, a Woolworths) without a good bite to eat in the vinyl department. I invariably came out with at least one LP to add to my collection.

Although I later joined the CD brigade, I stuck to my vinyl.

I even stole some of my parents’ LPs that were quickly gathering dust in the gramophone case, like the soundtrack to the 1958 film South Pacific, starring the non-singing Mitzi Gaynor and Rossano Brazzi. Some enchanted night still gives me goosebumps.

Like many music lovers, I’ve returned to vinyl in recent years, complementing South Pacific, Blondie’s Parallel Lines and Joe Jackson’s Look Sharp with Nick Cave’s Wild God and a remastered version of Steve Harley’s The Best Years of Our Lives and Cockney Rebel.

I trust WHSmith will choose their Wokingham branch as one of the 80 stores selling vinyl.

If so, it will become my go-to place on Saturdays, sandwiched between the obligatory parkrun (more like a walk in the park these days) and the train ride to see West Bromwich Albion at The Hawthorns.

Wokingham’s high street has taken a hit in recent years as a result of some major brands giving up the ghost (M&S) and most of the big banks (Barclays, Lloyds, NatWest and Santander) closing their branches.

Among the banks, only HSBC, Nationwide, Newbury Building Society and a post office remain.

Although the NatWest branch has been converted into apartments and the old Santander building now houses a fairly modern physiotherapist practice, the Barclays and Lloyds branches remain empty and are blots on the high street.

In Barclays’ defence, it now operates a part-time ‘local’ facility in the town’s community centre, although it does not offer any banking services.

Recently, officials from ATM operator Link visited my hometown in Berkshire to hear from those who believe the presence of a banking center would boost it.

Currently, the rules governing the centers (community banks funded by the big banks through an organization called Cash Access UK) are very defined. Although Link makes the final recommendation, it is the banks that determine the criteria on which it should be based.

Sadly there is no chance of Wokingham having one. For a center to be approved by Link, all banks in the city must have closed (or been notified of closure). Given that HSBC has already committed to keeping all its branches open until 2026, Wokingham is immediately ruled out.

Of course, the rules can change; They have already been modified to allow centers in some cities where Nationwide is present. But I am sure that Wokingham’s high street, dominated by a group of excellent independent traders, would be much richer with the presence of a centre.

Although financial markets are getting nervous about Reeves’ budget and the big spending plans he has in mind to rev up the economy, that hasn’t stopped Goldman Sachs from taking a positive view on the course of UK interest rates. . He believes that by November next year, the Bank of England will have cut them from the current 5 per cent to 2.75 per cent.

Of course, as inflation has fallen to 1.7 percent, there’s a good chance that interest rates are now on a downward trajectory. But there are too many potential setbacks to believe that by this time next year bank base rates will be at 2.75 percent.

Setbacks include rising oil prices, rising geopolitical tensions and fractures in the global supply chain. Added to this, of course, is the growing realization that Reeves’ high-tax, big-spending budget is nothing but bad news.

If interest rates hit 2.75 percent this time next year, I’ll eat my hat. I’ll also be reaching into my pocket and donating £275 to the Prostate Cancer UK charity.