Here's a Budget nuisance hit list we'd sign up for, Rachel

I look forward to the Budget like I look forward to rammed Tube carriages, A&E waits and Eighties synth hold music. I detest, yet I must persevere.

- SOPHIE WILKINSON

With the cost of living crisis now biting so hard that last week I saw a curry – one singular chicken madras – that cost £26 on Deliveroo, Rachel Reeves’s recent request that “each of us must do our bit” makes me shudder. Because so many British taxpayers have no bit left to give, her own “bit”, in fact, has been to come within a 1p coin’s width of raising income tax off the backs of working people, a bad idea only worsened by her U-turn, which gives the distinct impression she’s not got a clue what she’s doing.

To help out, I thought I’d offer up a different bit. How about the government putting the tax burden on the people and things that really cost us all?

I’m talking about so-called vice taxes, which have been around since 1643, when excise duties were slapped on beer and tobacco, and could effectively raise revenue from even more of society’s worst irritants. Or, as I like to call it, a hate-based tax system.