Yet real tax reductions change the relationship between state and individuals in a way that should cheer all Tories. They are culturally and economically liberating: they transform the way we think and act and unleash a nation’s energy, creativity and entrepreneurialism.

It’s a tragedy that the Hammond Treasury still hasn’t freed itself from its neo-Brownite social engineering mindset. It still believes that it can fiddle and cajole and finesse and control.

Hence why, under the plans being mooted, any tax cuts for the “young” would be matched by hikes on the “old”, possibly via another reduction in the tax incentives to save for a pension. Britain’s tax code, already one of the most complicated and confusing in the world, would become even more arbitrary.

The policy would infuriate older earners, turning them against the Tories. Far from calming down the war between the generations, it would exacerbate it.

It would also fail on its own terms. Why should a 22-year-old Premier League footballer pay a lower tax rate than a 58-year-old on the minimum wage?

Why should parents – and in practice especially women who take career breaks to have children in their 20s and 30s – be penalised with a higher tax rate when they return to the workforce?