Rishi Sunak used the expression “sharing the proceeds of growth” at least twice. Yes, reader, that is a refrain lifted directly from the Gordon Brown song book.

In the same spirit, Mr Sunak decided not to abandon the rise in National Insurance: that increase, which had been described as the most ill-timed tax rise in history, would go ahead as planned but with a significant alteration. The threshold for paying NICs would rise to the same level as the threshold for income tax – £12,500 per year. So no one, the Chancellor announced triumphantly, earning below that amount would pay either, and everyone on low and medium earnings would be helped.

This will make a difference to the budgets of a great many households but it also served to save the principle of the tax rise to which the Chancellor was obviously committed. (In truth, the discrepancy between NI and income tax thresholds was an anomaly that should have been corrected long ago.) And he did not explain how the increase in employers’ NICs (a payroll tax) was consistent with his general theme of encouraging businesses to invest and grow.

Indeed, there was quite a lot of having it both ways: fuel duty would be reduced by 5p – which would probably displease climate change activists – but VAT was abolished on green home energy purchases like solar panels and heat pumps, which would appeal to them.

On wasteful government spending, we did not hear much. There was a nod toward the need for NHS reform – to see to it that “every pound” spent on healthcare (which is what that NICs rise is all about for the moment) is well spent. But no more than a nod. Gordon Brown would have been proud of that vagueness.

The biggest announcement was that the basic rate of income tax would drop from 20 per cent to 19 per cent by the end of 2024: a change which would obviously be of greatest benefit to the low paid but would be felt in middle income households, too.

Mr Sunak described this as part of his plan to “cut taxes on working families” and to incentivise work. He was committed, he said, to the principle that people should be able to spend their own money rather than having the Government spend it for them.

But there is a real problem with all this. Mr Sunak espouses what is clearly the politically attractive message that the lower paid should be helped most generously when the cost of living rises. But that means that anyone who emerges from low pay will feel much less benefit.

What this policy does is simply replace the old “welfare trap” in which people found they were better off not working at all, with a “low wage” trap in which people who improve their earnings are less advantaged. This becomes a disincentive to self-improvement.

Gordon Brown’s solution was to extend working benefits so far up the earnings ladder that almost everybody got something from the state.

Presumably Mr Sunak doesn’t want to go there.