Above all, it takes no account of what else is happening in the wider economy and society. One extra reason why annuity rates are now so low is because of government-backed policy, executed by the Bank of England, to secure negative real interest rates. It is all but impossible for savers, unwilling to buy shares or property, to see their savings keep their value — which will remain the case with the Chancellor's new "Super-ISA". Not surprisingly, the savings ratio, already too low, has plummeted. According to the Office of Budget Responsibility, it will fall further still — from 7.2 per cent in 2012 to just 3.2 per cent in 2018. At the same time, we are seeing a housing boom, deliberately fuelled by the government through cheap money and easy loans. A substantial share of the money released by the Osborne pension reform will go into property, inflating that bubble further, pricing out first-time buyers and later risking a rerun of the crash.

Philosophical conservatives, an endangered species, once prided themselves on grasping human nature, detecting historic trends, and, as a consequence, spotting and avoiding potholes. But anyone with any common sense at all, looking at Britain now, should be able to see where Osborne's pensioner liberation plans must lead. Britain is a society which spends today, not saves for tomorrow. The bourgeois values that underpinned a savings culture have dissolved faster than the savings themselves. Ingrained, even obsessive thrift, antipathy to debt, hatred of "being a nuisance", a fear of the stigma of destitution even more intense than the discomfort of deprivation — these traits are now as foreign to modern Britain as knee-breeches and the snuff box. The prior demolition of middle-class attitudes has alone enabled today's systematic destruction of savings by government on a scale few Marxists could have hoped for. Even admitting to being "middle class" is shunned. Just 35 per cent of Britons now do so, though 60 per cent have middle-class jobs.

This is becoming, viscerally and perhaps irreversibly, a nation of chancers. Whether it is gambling-betting shops taking over the high street, gambling ads multiplying on television screens, addiction to online gambling reaching pornographic proportions — or just foolish borrowing for instant gratification — with nine million people over-borrowed on credit cards and 5,800 per cent interest charged by pay-day loan sharks — Britain is simply not a nation of responsible individuals. George Osborne's irresponsible Budget may spell trouble, in today's conditions, on a scale that even its sterner critics do not yet admit.