It's time to brace yourself. Labour's spiteful, vindictive tax time bomb is coming... and this is who is going to be hardest hit. Every expert I've spoken to is outraged. God help us: JEFF PRESTRIDGE

It won’t be long before we know what nasties are coming our way in the autumn Budget.Higher taxes on capital gains and personal wealth are as sure as night follows day.Yet, while we will have to wait until October 28 for all the awful nitty-gritty contained in John Healey’s inaugural Budget to be made public, Labour’s attack on the strivers and the prudent is already in overdrive.For that, we must ‘thank’ (blame) Rachel from Accounts, Healey’s predecessor, who during her disastrous time as chancellor of the exchequer took every opportunity to hoover an increasing chunk of our wealth into the Treasury’s coffers with the efficiency of a high-tech Dyson vacuum cleaner. It was envy politics of the highest order. Classic madhouse socialism.Before being booted out of No11, Rachel Reeves put in train measures designed to undermine our ability to save for retirement through a tax-friendly pension. They were the equivalent of ticking pension ‘time bombs’ designed to go off in the near future and do damage to our retirement wealth.One of these will explode in 2029 when curbs on the use of salary sacrifice arrangements by employers, to mitigate the cost of providing works pensions, will kick in.The new rules will hit employers with yet more business costs – in the form of higher national insurance bills. Employees could also see their wages chipped away if employers decide they must bear part of the cost of Reeves’s tax grab.According to the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies, it will be higher earners and private-sector workers who bear the brunt of these changes. The UK will have to wait until October 28 for all the nitty-gritty contained in John Healey’s inaugural Budget to be made public Rachel Reeves took every opportunity as chancellor to hoover an increasing chunk of our wealth into the Treasury’s coffers, writes Jeff PrestridgeNo surprise there. We have been down this sorry road with Labour many times before. Remember Gordon Brown’s first act as chancellor under the allegedly progressive Blair government of 1997? A £5billion annual tax raid on company pensions that triggered the beginning of the end for defined benefit pension schemes in the private sector: Pension arrangements which delivered a lifetime income to retirees based on a mix of years worked and their salary.Yet the more damaging Reeves pension time bomb will be triggered next April when new rules governing the taxation of inherited pension funds kick in. At best, its impact will be punitive. But ‘egregious’ is a more honest description.Whoever at the Treasury thought up this spiteful, vindictive tax attack on pensions should be ashamed of themselves – although of course the new rules won’t apply to their gold-plated public-sector pensions, so they don’t really care. For the record, public-sector pensions have protected ‘TN’ status. That is, immunity from raiding Treasury Neanderthals.Without getting mired in personal finance minutiae (which money journalists like me and my colleagues on Money Mail love to do), the changes primarily affect defined contribution pension pots which most workers in the private sector – employed or self-employed – now pay into.By defined contribution, I mean pension funds which grow in value according to how much you put in and how well its underlying investments perform. Those with defined benefit pensions, now almost the preserve of public sector workers, are not the focus of Labour’s outrageous tax grab.‘Strange that?’ you may say. ‘No,’ is my response. It’s Labour yet again undermining our pensions without an iota of contrition. As I’ve said before and no doubt will say again before I finish this missive, it’s envy politics. Down with the strivers.The nub of next April’s pension time bomb is as follows. Currently, if you die with an unspent defined contribution pension fund, the remaining value falls outside the inheritance tax (IHT) net. This means your beneficiaries can access the money free of all tax if you die before the age of 75.For those who die later in life, the tax system is not so forgiving in that any withdrawals from the unspent pension fund that a beneficiary subsequently takes incur income tax at their own marginal rate: 20, 40 or 45 per cent. But again, IHT – currently charged at 40 per cent on the portion of estates above £325,000 – is not an issue.Yet, from April 6 next year, the rules change dramatically. The value of any unused pension fund will then fall into the IHT fishing net.For some beneficiaries, it will result in the proceeds from an inherited pension fund (where the plan-holder was aged 75 or more) being decimated by a toxic combination of IHT and income tax.More toxic (financially) than the poison Doctor Hawley Harvey Crippen used to do away with his wife Cora 116 years ago. As my Money Mail colleagues reported at the weekend, 91 per cent of an inherited pension fund could be lost to tax in the most extreme of cases.When I scrutinised this attack on pensions in the immediate wake of Reeves’ 2024 Budget, I was shocked by its severity. I wasn’t alone. Baroness Altmann, a former pensions minister and campaigner, knows more about pensions that almost anyone else in this country. And she didn’t hold back. It is not right that someone who has saved with the specific aim of passing down wealth to their loved ones in a tax-efficient manner is suddenly told the rules are changing, says Prestridge‘This massive change in pensions tax treatment is a classic example of how tax meddling deters pension planning,’ she told me at the time.‘Long-term retirement plans need a stable policy environment. Many people who worked hard to arrange their financial affairs to best help loved ones now find their plans thrown into disarray through no fault of their own.’ Bang on the nail. Readers were equally outraged, with one lovely couple from Bournemouth telling me they felt ‘like fools’ for being prudent, ‘only to land our two children with a big IHT bill when we pass away’.In the next few months, as we edge ever closer to April 6 (the start of the new tax year), I am sure that many column inches will be dedicated to the savageness of this unprecedented tax attack on our pensions. It has already started and leading financial experts are slowly coming out of the woodwork to attack the changes.A few days ago, investing platform AJ Bell called for the Government to rethink its stance on inherited pensions and ‘go back to the drawing board’. It described the Treasury’s decision to tax inherited pensions as though they are ‘both capital [attracting IHT] and income [liable to income tax]’ as ‘intrinsically unfair’.It’s hard to disagree with this assessment. My view is that the pension tax grab is wrong on multiple levels.First, it cannot be right that someone who has saved religiously into a pension fund with the specific aim of passing down wealth to their loved ones in a tax-efficient manner is suddenly told the rules are changing. It’s a form of retrospective taxation.Secondly, it’s crass that the main solution available to those wishing to mitigate the cost of this impending tax trap is to spend their pension before they die. They shouldn’t be forced down this route by politicians.But, more worryingly, it’s a nasty assault on strivers who have spent their working lives painstakingly putting aside a slice of their hard-earned income to provide financial security for themselves in retirement – and their loved ones after they die.Striving should be encouraged, not discouraged. But that’s not in Labour’s DNA – and never has been. It’s more interested in a ruthless policy of class warfare on Middle England.God help us.