Never have so many been taxed so heavily for the benefit of so few. The moment for rebellion has come!

Looking forward to the day you start drawing your pension and can put your feet up? Congratulations! You are one of the few who have put enough aside to retire in comfort. Three-quarters of us apparently do not expect to be able to enjoy a traditional retirement for the simple reason that we won’t be able to afford it.

And a survey by the insurance giant Aviva reveals that only about a fifth of us have substantial savings and investments of £100,000 or more. The rest have put very little aside for their old age. One in five pensioners lives on just £25 a day. Many still have mortgages and other large debts. Those like me who are in their early 50s, with children still at school or university, now reckon that we will need to go on working well into our 70s.

If, that is, we do not fall foul of the ageism that still forces vigorous men and women in their 60s to stop working. Personally, the prospect of working till I drop does not fill me with dread. Having become self-employed in middle age, I enjoy working for myself. But I no longer have an employer contributing to an occupational pension.

Like most other members of our generation, my wife and I had our children in our 30s. This means that we are still supporting them as we approach our 60s, further depleting our modest savings. We are fortunate in having paid off our mortgage, but about 20 per cent of 55-year-olds are still devoting a large proportion of their income to paying it off. Many are trapped in negative equity, through no fault of their own. Even the Prince of Wales was apparently caught out by the fall in property prices during the recession.

Plenty of older people are subsidising children or grandchildren, or simply maintaining their living standards, by borrowing money against the value of their house. These ‘equity release schemes’ may seem like a godsend to the asset-rich but cash-poor middle classes. But they may saddle millions with debt just as they reach the end of their working lives.

Often, we run up these debts for the best of reasons. Many people scrimp and save to give their children and grandchildren a good start in life, including a private education. The Prime Minister’s late father, Ian Cameron, reportedly had occasion to remind the young David, then a schoolboy at Eton, that his fees were not cheap. That was in the 1980s. Since then, the cost of a private education has risen consistently above inflation. No wonder many parents who go down this route end up in debt.

When I recently asked my bank about raising my overdraft limit, the first question they asked was: ‘Are you paying school fees, sir?’

Many of our debts, of course, are incurred for less altruistic reasons: foreign holidays, high-tech gadgetry, fancy cars – the list is endless. As a nation, we are going through the debtor’s equivalent of cold turkey.

Dickens said all that needs to be said about this when he put the immortal words into the mouth of Mr Micawber, the endearing character he based on his own improvident father: ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.’

The fiftysomethings can expect no sympathy from their juniors: life is tough for the young too, as university places and jobs are scarce, while getting on to the property ladder is harder than ever.

But there is one respect in which the middle-aged are entitled to righteous anger. Never before, in the history of taxation, have so many been taxed so heavily for the benefit of so few. During the 13 years when Gordon Brown ran the British economy, he squeezed the middle class until the pips squeaked.

The burden of the bloated bureaucracy to which George Osborne is now taking an axe has fallen primarily on those who reached their maximum earning potential during the last government. The revelation this week that the Revenue bungled PAYE rates so that millions of us were paying too much tax merely adds insult to injury. The fact is that we are grotesquely overtaxed and it will take years to undo the damage to our national work ethic. Unless hard work is rewarded again and people are allowed to keep the lion’s share of their hard-earned pay, the problem of pensioner poverty will only get worse.

Our ageing population is healthier than ever before, but that still does not give the government the right to raise the retirement age indefinitely. The Coalition plans to raise the state pension age to 66 by 2016 for men and 2020 for women. Yet this is breaking the contract between the generations, because our pensions are not mere welfare handouts but an insurance policy for old age, financed by our national insurance contributions. Just because the Treasury blew our contributions to pay for Labour’s pet projects does not mean it is entitled to arbitrarily rewrite the generational contract.

In the United States, the anger of middle-class, middle-aged taxpayers has boiled over, giving rise to the Tea Party movement. Like the original Boston Tea Party, which was a protest against the taxes imposed by George III on the American colonies, who had no voice in Parliament, the modern Tea Party is at heart a revolt against the over-mighty state. Already the Tea Party is having a massive impact on November’s mid-term congressional elections. Politicians are being forced to respond to this nationwide tax revolt, or face deselection or defeat.

Here, the same rumbles of dissent are felt in Westminster, where Liberal Democrat pressure to raise taxes still further has so far been resisted by the Tories, who fear the wrath of the voters.

Perhaps, though, we also need an organised grassroots movement to force our rulers to learn the lessons of the last government. Never again should politicians of Left or Right get away with wasting the taxpayers’ money on such a gargantuan scale. Never again should our rulers feel entitled to line their own pockets, or feel tempted to bribe the electorate with its own money.

The Tea Party is a uniquely American phenomenon, deeply rooted in the history of the United States. But here, too, we have strong traditions, indeed much more ancient ones, which serve to remind politicians that there are limits to what government can or should do. From the Peasants’ Revolt to the Civil War, from the great Victorian movements to abolish slavery or for free trade and universal suffrage to Margaret Thatcher’s revolution in the 1980s, British history is full of dramatic moments when the establishment is obliged by the people to change its ways.

Now, again, I sense that the worm is turning. The general election may have been inconclusive, but the verdict was very clear on the overtaxing and overspending conduct of the last government, which had become habitual and even instinctive. Even the Lib Dems, a traditionally high-tax, high-spend party, have been forced to undergo the most unexpected conversion since St Paul on the road to Damascus.

So there is hope for the anxious generation of fiftysomethings to which I belong. Even if it is too late for us to look forward to a comfortable retirement, we can at least help to ensure that our children are never again burdened with the cost of political folly.

Daniel Johnson, Editor of Standpoint, for the Daily Mail.