Two years into retirement and after a significant bout of inflation has eroded my savings and increased my costs, and with little or no prospect of increasing my earning power, my shoulders don't feel that broad. But, someone has to pay for all those public sector pay increases I suppose, and they really don't care whether people like me support them or not.

They will keep their promise of not increasing personal taxes on “working families” but will reduce allowances such as tax relief on pension contributions and other such raids. Starmer chumming the water ahead of the budget.

I was as sick of the Tories as anyone but I didn't vote for this lot either. I have 5 more salary sacrifice pension accumulation payments due to go in before I finish work, exceeding the £60K annual allowance this tax year by using some remaining carry forward, how many of those will be left intact before the screws tighten?

Then what impact will they make to my decumulation plans? Target the 25% tax free lump sum for DC pensions? Create a new personal tax allowance for pensioners? A form of means testing for state pensions for couples with additional private pensions and ISA savings?

Simply taking more money off the greying population to shovel into the inefficient black hole money pit of public services isn't fixing the efficiency of service delivery problem.

Why do I get a NHS letter confirming an appointment after I have also received a text message confirming the same? Why does it seem like there are staff just milling about our local hospital without a great deal to do whenever I am sat in the waiting room for hours on end?

They have only been in power for 2 months and already qualify as the worst government. Every decision they take is wrong and damaging to the country - energy, immigration, justice, taxation, education, health, public sector pay, free speech.

It is like having the bottom class from school put in charge.

Five years of this nonsense is going to be a living hell.

It could be more than 1 term , with the opposition split between the Tories and reform , it looks like a classic case of " Divide and rule " , plus I expect Labour to do everything they can to remain in power for as long as possible . That means many more public sector workers on higher pay , plus higher benefits , more immigration and maybe votes for younger people .

Just come off the phone with HL making some enquiries about crystallising the remainder of my SIPP before the autumn statement as I don't think this government can be trusted. The advisor was quite candid saying that they'd recently had a large amount of enquiries about SIPP crystallising.