While the country has been watching Labour’s corruption scandals in disgust, Ministers have been quietly carrying out a stealth move on Britain’s pension savings. If you’re a pensioner in Britain today, Rachel Reeves has her eye on you. First it was the winter fuel allowance, stripped back without apology. Then, coming next year, the standard state pension will be dragged into income tax.

Labour froze the tax thresholds and let inflation do the dirty work. You worked your whole life, paid in National Insurance, and were told the state pension was your safety net - but the Chancellor will claw it back. And now, Labour is about to get their grip on private pensions. The Government is legislating to give themselves powers to direct pension funds to invest where they want.

Most people rely on pension funds to invest their hard earned savings wisely. The first duty of the managers and trustees of those funds is to do the best job they can to provide pensioners with the income they will need in later life. But the Government is about to cut across that duty and give itself a say in how your pension is invested.

This power is buried deep in Labour’s Pensions Bill. It will allow ministers to direct pension schemes to invest in particular types of UK assets if they decide voluntary targets are not being met. It gives politicians leverage over how pension funds allocate billions of pounds.

The Government desperately wants more investment in the UK as the economy struggles under their disastrous management.

Labour’s choices have spooked investment, business confidence is weak and capital is cautious. But instead of fixing the economic fundamentals, they are eyeing up Britain’s pension pots.

Most ordinary savers are in default pension schemes. They don’t have private advisers or sit watching markets all day. They trust the system to be regulated and run responsibly. Those are the pots Labour want to nudge, steer and, direct.

The wealthy can restructure, diversify, move money around. The shop worker, the mechanic, retired factory hand cannot. Their pension is what it is.

If your pension fund is steered away from the best investments towards assets chosen to serve a government strategy, your returns will reflect that.

Lower returns mean smaller pots. Smaller pots mean tighter retirements. The cost lands on pensioners - both today's and tomorrow's.

Pension money exists to provide income in retirement, it should not be used to compensate for a Government that cannot attract investment on its own merits. You should be able to put your pension where you want. And fund Trustees rightly have clear fiduciary duties to invest pension funds wisely. They should not become pawns in Rachel Reeves' desperate game to salvage her economic credibility.

The Office for Budget Responsibility has confirmed that Rachel Reeves’ Budget contained not a single growth measure. Not one.

This Labour Government has the wrong approach to the economy. They don't know how you get growth. They have a disastrous lack of business experience. And Labour sees profit as a dirty word. It's a dire cocktail of incompetence and the whole country will suffer from the hangover.

Under Labour we have an economy run by no one who’s ever actually worked in a business. This is a government of bureaucrats, managers, and moralisers.

They would rather a managed market than a free market – controlled by committees, policed by regulators, and hemmed in by the unions.

And at the heart of Labour’s ideology is the belief that prosperity is a pie to be divided rather than baked, that the role of government is to redistribute rather than to enable, that wealth creation is suspect unless it’s done in the public sector.

That mindset is why Britain’s economy is struggling. Private sector choked by regulation, public sector bloated by ideology, and a government that’s forgotten that growth begins where government ends.

The Conservatives under Kemi Badenoch know that this has to change. Our economy needs the burden of taxes and bureaucracy to be lifted. We need to celebrate and back free enterprise.

We know growth is achieved by the efforts of businesses across the country, big and small, not through the meddling of Government. The state needs to shrink and get out of the way.

That's how we will get a new era of growth and jobs, opportunity and prosperity. Labour should leave people's pensions alone. 

Helen Whately is Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary