MY older brother left school at 16 with one O-level. He joined a local pharmaceutical company as a laboratory technician and worked there for over 40 years.

When he joined the company it was a government research facility which became the trail blazer for Mrs Thatcher‘s privatisation programme. Over the years it was bought, sold, taken over and is now part of an American owned multi-national. Throughout his time there my brother worked in different roles in different parts of the complex until they made him an early retirement package he couldn’t refuse. It was a standing joke that he’d been there so long his position would always be safe – it would be too expensive to make him redundant!

But my brother is an exception. Research suggests that the average person currently in work will have six different employers; those just starting out can expect 10 to 15 jobs and those still in school are being educated for roles that haven’t been invented yet (as if teachers’ jobs weren’t hard enough anyway!) The field of employment is becoming contested space. And in last week’s budget the chancellor demonstrated he’s fallen foul of this. With more and more people now self-employed he planned a quick raid on their national savings contributions. You can’t blame him. While business owners reap all the benefits from ‘self employed’ arrangements and zero hours contracts with no pension, sick pay, holiday pay or maternity benefits to pay, the treasury has been losing out on the employers’ National Insurance contributions.

Unfortunately for Mr Hammond, his ruse to make the self employed make up the difference backfired. Tory back benchers soon realised that ‘White Van Man’, having propelled them to power, might rebel. The growing army of the self-employed are also a growing army of voters whose political power had been amply demonstrated in the Brexit vote.

Meanwhile, Mr Hammond’s predecessor was having his own issues around work. While most of us manage a handful of employers sequentially, Mr Osborne does it concurrently, like the leader of Wiltshire Council, only more so. For most of us, multitasking means juggling a job, home, family life and ‘me time’. For Mr Osborne it means juggling a six-figure consultancy in the States, a constituency MP role in the North and editing a daily newspaper. “I’ll be an editor in the morning and an MP in the afternoon,” he told us. (How do other constituency MPs fill their mornings, I wonder?) Whether MPs should have other jobs is a now matter for the parliamentary standards committee; however I’ve no doubt Mr Osborne will get away with it; he got away with murder as Chancellor.

So I continue to trot from employer to employer via spats of enforced self-employment, stunned at the contempt in which I am held by the politicians whose wages I pay…