hame on Boris Johnson, and shame on the Conservative Party. They have disgraced themselves,
lied to their voters, repudiated their principles and treated millions of their supporters with utter contempt. And for what?
To momentarily wrong-foot Sir Keir Starmer? To steal Labour’s clothes, not for a greater purpose but because it’s easier than actually devising their own conservative policies to improve Britain? To pat themselves on the back, and boast of how brilliant they are at the Machiavellian, unprincipled game of Blair or Osborne-style triangulation politics? To further convince the electorate that every politician is only in it for themselves, for their ministerial cars, for the pathetic pretend power? Is this why all those Cabinet ministers joined the Tory party, and penned all those paeans to free enterprise and low taxes? To be complicit in the moral destruction of the Conservative Party?
This is a seminal moment in British politics, one that could turn out to be as toxic, as poisonous and as destructive as the ERM crisis, the Iraq dossier or the bank bailouts. The damage wreaked by the Government’s juvenile approach to policymaking will be immense and long-lasting, even if it doesn’t immediately register in opinion polls. Promising not to raise or to cut taxes was always the one weapon Labour couldn’t match, the most powerful way to remind voters that the socialists would steal their money; now any such pledge would remind voters that the Tories are utterly untrustworthy.
The scale of Johnson’s shift to the Left is staggering: his tax increases combined are the largest in half a century. The Treasury’s claim that it is hiking National Insurance by 1.25 percentage points is sub-Brownite spin: the tax rate on labour income has actually jumped by 2.5 percentage points. Combined with frozen income and other tax thresholds and the raid on corporation tax, total tax rises will be worth 1.6 per cent of GDP. The tax burden will hit its “highest-ever sustained level”, the Institute for Fiscal Studies calculates.
The NHS will have become the state, and the state will have become the NHS: Clement Attlee’s socialist government couldn’t have imagined just how powerful its Left-wing choice of a health funding and delivery mechanism would turn out to be at destroying conservatism and capitalism. In 2004-05, the NHS and social care accounted for 28 per cent of current public spending; by 2024-25, this will have reached 40 per cent, according to the Resolution Foundation. How long will it take to hit over 50 per cent?
The ratchet is out of control, guaranteeing the gradual socialisation of British society and the need for ever higher taxes. Just when the Left thought they had lost, their assumptions shattered by Brexit, their triumph is about to be near total.
The Tories’ have only themselves to blame: why did they never reform the funding and structure of the NHS? Why are they perverting the noble concept of private property by turning it into a taxpayer-guaranteed entitlement? Why are they nodding through Johnson’s decision to pick an absurd, statist plan for social care rather than a more insurance-based option?
In time, Labour will promise to lower the £86,000 cap; eventually, it will be zero, and all care homes will be nationalised. The Tories have learnt nothing from previous extensions of the welfare state in 1906-15 and 1948: a conservative approach is to build on the private sector, to fill in the gaps, to supplement private initiative – not supplant it, which is the way social care will now also eventually go.
In the shorter-term, Johnson’s extra spending will fail to tackle the NHS backlog. The pressure will be on to raise the levy again, but the unfairness of hammering younger generations priced out of the housing market will make calls for even more destructive taxes, this time on capital, hard to resist. Never forget that the Government was considering imposing a wealth or mansion tax shortly after it was elected. What fresh hell will Britain’s beleaguered Tory voters face next?
The present tax rises are a choice, not a necessity. The ongoing additional spending caused by the pandemic could have been met by cutting expenditure in other areas, and the one-off costs of Covid added to national debt. The coronavirus is an excuse for Johnson’s strange urge to adopt full-fat social democracy, although it is likely that the enthusiasm with which so many embraced lockdown encouraged his Government’s collectivist bent.
The National Insurance increase is not merely an unforgivable manifesto broken promise: it symbolises the party’s repudiation of the conservative and classical liberal world view, its rejection of Burke, Locke, Hayek, Friedman and Oakeshott. This Government is no longer Thatcherite, or even conservative: it is Blue Labour. It combines Left-wing economics – more tax and spending on a welfare state in hock to the producer class, ever more regulations, green central planning – with support for Brexit, patriotism and the Armed Forces. It tries (but fails) to be tough on crime,
illegal immigration and the woke onslaught.
Old Labour would have loved this combination, but it is not conservatism. Ever since the rise of socialism in the 19th century, and especially during the past 40 years, conservatives have argued that a smaller state, lower taxes, and a greater reliance on markets, civil society and individual responsibility represent a philosophically and economically superior form of social organisation. Lower taxes and lower spending boosts GDP growth, they explained; personal responsibility encourages virtuous behaviour such as saving and hard work. High social costs kill jobs, they wrote: just look at France. Big increases in spending just trigger massive waste and inflation, they argued: remember Gordon Brown?
An entire intellectual tradition now lies trashed by a Conservative Party which has, for the sake of convenience, unthinkingly swallowed its opponents’ ideology. Either the Tories believe that tax rates no longer impact the economy, or they couldn’t care less, and are embracing a low-growth, stagnant future. For decades, Tories boasted about how better the UK model was than that of the Eurozone; today, they are adopting it out of laziness, despite having fought so hard to leave the EU. Reaganomics is dead in Britain: there are now two Labour parties at one on economics, but divided on culture. How bitterly, heartbreakingly disappointing.
www.telegraph.co.uk
