There was a very good article in yesterday’s Times by Emma Duncan, with the heading, “Is the problem the PM? Labour? No, it’s us” and the sub-heading, “We insist on retaining a big welfare state — but we’re not prepared to pay the taxes needed to sustain it”.
It’s such a sensible piece that I’m pasting in several paragraphs below – emboldening a few sentences that encapsulate her theme.
Changing leaders is pretty pointless. Whoever is Prime Minister is going to fail to “deliver” what the electorate wants because he or she is promising an impossibility, and because the magic money tree stubbornly refuses to grow. So politicians continue to cynically assure us that their particular yellow brick road leads to a horn of plenty – while we, jaw-droppingly, continue to believe them.
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The problem is us. We, the voters, are deluding ourselves. We are living beyond our means and don’t want to stop, so we keep electing politicians who make unrealistic promises and getting rid of them when they fail to deliver.
Half a century ago we took a more modest view of our means and our deserts. Part of Margaret Thatcher’s appeal was her grocer’s-daughter’s belief that you could only spend what you earned. “If the state wants to spend more,” she said, “it can do so only by borrowing your savings or by taxing you more. It is no good thinking that someone else will pay: that ‘someone else’ is you.”
That changed under Tony Blair. The peace dividend had kicked in and the economy was booming, so every year the state could spend more without raising taxes. We got used to it.
Since then we have had a series of expensive economic shocks, a period of low growth and a reversal of the peace dividend. Public funds have been depleted as a result, but the voters appear to think the government can go on spending more every year without taxing them more to pay for it.
There’s no mileage in telling the electorate uncomfortable fiscal truths, however. Theresa May made the mistake of doing so when she tried to tackle the huge problem of social care. She was duly punished at the polls, thus ensuring no politician has done anything as rash — ie as honest — since.
Her replacement was the ideal prime minister for a self-deluding electorate. Boris Johnson’s “cakeism” encapsulated the nation’s determination to have a generous welfare state while not paying the taxes necessary to sustain it.
How Reform UK, which looks like being the next beneficiary of the voters’ discontent, will solve the country’s economic problems is a secret that Nigel Farage is wisely unwilling to reveal. He has made one thing clear, however: he’s sticking with the pension triple lock, which, on its current trajectory, will push government debt up to 270 per cent of GDP over the next half-century.
Labour, meanwhile, are running around like headless chickens promising “boldness”. That’s generally taken as meaning a shift to the left. Angela Rayner, the only one of the likely candidates to have said anything substantial in recent days, made a statement that implies nationalisation, a higher minimum wage and higher taxes on the rich. The first is a terrible use of taxpayers’ money, the second would ensure there were fewer jobs for poorer people, and the third would drive away even more of those who, by international standards, already pay an unusually large proportion of income tax.was his terrible character.
