Labour is always up to something, and it’s always the same thing. To tax people more and pay more benefits to others. Politicians like to start small when imposing new taxes, then ramp them up over time. That’s the game here. Healey’s latest tax raid totalled £8.5billion, but more will follow. Especially if pensions minister Torsten Bell has his way. This Labour bright spark has very big plans, particularly when it comes to your tax bill. And so far, he's been remarkably successful at getting Labour to implement them.

Bell is only just getting started, and that's bad news for savers, pensioners and anybody who has built a bit of cash for their future. Bell is coming for it. For a decade, he was head of left-wing think tank the Resolution Foundation, where he spent his time dreaming up new ways of tax us more. Eventually, he came up with 20. I listed them all in August last year. There’s doubtless many buzzing around his overheated brain.

Tragically for Torsten, Rachel Reeves and Healey haven't introduced all of them. But they’ve both given it a good shot. Bell wanted to hike capital gains tax. Reeves did that. He demanded higher taxes on second homes. Reeves delivered. He advocated cutting inheritance tax relief for farmers. She did that, too. And on businesses.

Bell also wanted to scrap the Lifetime ISA. Done. He wants higher taxes on homes. Burnham is all over it. He wanted to scrap the 5p fuel duty cut. It took an energy crisis to stop that (but it will happen). Crucially, Bell called for the state pension triple lock to go and Burnham plans to oblige.

There's a remarkable crossover between what Bell wants and what Bell gets. He is notorious for indulging in frantic bouts of performative swearing on those rare occasions when he doesn't look like getting his way. Here's an example of a typical Bell sentence, delivered in an otherwise sober departmental meeting: “f*ck this, f*ck that, we’ve got to f*ck them all and then we’ve got to f*ck them some more."

There’s something else he wants. To extend National Insurance to areas of income that still escape it, including self-employment, buy-to-let income and pensioners. Again, Reeves did his bidding. She slapped a 2% surcharge on savings and rental income. On Wednesday, Healey doubled that to 4%. And why not? Bell wrote much of his Budget. He also helped pen Reeves's second shambolic effort.

From next April, savers and landlords will pay rates of 24%, 44% and 49%. Bell won’t think that’s anywhere enough. I’m betting that 4% surcharge will climb to 8%. Here’s why.

My theory is that he's pushing Britain towards a system where everybody pays the same tax on their income, whether from working, saving, renting out a property or drawing a pension. It's an idea previously floated by ... the Resolution Foundation.

In a report last September, it proposed increasing income tax by 2% while cutting National Insurance by the same amount. What's the point? To clobber pensioners. Employees would be broadly unaffected, but pensioners, landlords, savers and the self-employed would pay more. The Foundation argued this would simplify the tax system and move towards abolishing employee National Insurance altogether. Trust me, this won't stop at 2%. Healey has just shown us that.

Bell had quit by then, and this isn't official Labour policy, but the direction of travel is striking. If I'm right, and the ultimate ambition is to merge income tax and National Insurance, it would end up with pensioners, who currently don't incur NI, paying an extra 8% on their incomes.

As would landlords and savers. Labour has not announced such a plan, but in my view, that’s where it’s heading. Nobody will be more delighted than Torsten Bell if it gets there. And as I said, he always gets his way.