“Instead, what we have is a government proposing tax increases for the next five years. So now we can’t even fight the election saying with Labour, you’re going to have tax rises. His politics are actively bad. This is red Toryism – we can no longer stand for the uniqueness of the Conservative party.”
Equally opposed was the idea of the so-called “party of business” taking a scalpel to tax compensation and dragging fiscal millions into a higher tax bracket while giving inflation-busting pay rises to people on benefits.
When the Tories took office 12 years ago, six per cent of adults paid the 40 per cent tax rate – soon to be 14 per cent, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Around one million people will pay the additional tax rate of 45 per cent after yesterday’s changes – four times higher than in 2010.
If workers like this theft weren’t bad enough, we also had the man in charge of the purse strings of a supposed aspirational nation, describing the dividends the company bosses were getting as “unearned income”.
While the Tories may have been largely supportive of retaining triple-lock pensions – mindful, as ever, of the aging of their ever-shrinking fan base, there is still deep concern about the little-discussed issue of the 23 per cent rise in work welfare age from covid.
A pledge to increase the NHS budget by £3.3bn in each of the next two years, with no word on reform, was met with a similar sense of disbelief. “We have seen more and more money go into the health service in recent years only for patients to face longer waiting lists and fewer operations,” said one disgusted former cabinet minister. “He talked about how all public services need to tackle waste and inefficiency but made no mention of taking 90,000 civil servants off the payroll.” Another pointed out that an increase in education spending was long overdue – as schools have received just a three per cent rise since the Conservatives came to power in 2010 compared to a huge 42 per cent increase in health spending.
Some of the proposed post-Brexit supply-side reforms would be welcome (albeit several years late), but it was the boast that “not a penny” was cut from the capital budget really nothing to celebrate about this widely despised white elephant HS2 already billions over budget?
Furthermore, there was no contradiction in the Chancellor appointing Sir Patrick Vallance to help turn Britain into the ‘next Silicon Valley’ when it was the government’s chief scientific officer and fellow lockdowns who contributed to Britain’s current economic woes by suggesting the country shut down for the third time due to Omicron last Christmas?
Praising Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, alongside Treasury “orthodox” George Osborne, his successor has left the Tories in little doubt about who really runs the country.
As one veteran MP put it: “There is a sense that monetary policy has been relegated to the Bank of England and fiscal policy has been relegated to the OBR, so what exactly is the government doing?”
With the OBR predicting that government spending will still be 43 per cent of GDP in five years – four per cent above pre-pandemic levels, the Conservatives last night bemoaned the low-tax, small government that has historically proved that he won the election press. As with the handling of the coronavirus crisis, the cure is once again threatening to be worse than the disease for a Tory party on life support.
