What says the cat-loving Ann Widdecombe about J.D. Vance? But British fan clubs of that sort of thing are of no concern. The British are inured to "tax hikes", and do not mind them too much if they can see something for them. What they mind are spending cuts, including being denied things that they had been led to expect.
It has been 32 years since a party promising tax cuts has won a General Election, and it delivered the opposite in office. To this day, it claims to have bequeathed "a golden economic legacy" that must therefore have been based on much higher taxes. It is making the same claim today.
Tony Blair's and Gordon Brown's tax rises led to a second landslide, to a third comfortable overall majority, and to Brown's effortless accession to the Premiership a full decade after the supposedly infamous "raid on pensions". During that period, the very poor stopped voting, but the tax-paying, pension-drawing classes carried on voting for Blair and Brown. Brown was massively popular among them until a bank went bust in New York. If anyone noticed the sale of the gold reserves, which a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency did not need, then no one minded.
Even when global circumstances had led Brown (wrongly, but that is not the present point) to implement austerity, then the other side could not win an overall majority against him. It did, however, win more votes on a less austere manifesto than his, even if, again, it behaved very differently once it had won, although it is possible to attribute that to its Coalition with the heirs of Whiggery, of Gladstonianism, of Alderman Alfred Roberts, of the founders of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and of both sides of the Lib-Lab Pact that had introduced monetarism to Britain.
The British do not mind tax increases, or at the very least they are resigned to them. What they do not like are spending cuts. Having seen five Left Independents elected this year with several near misses, and having created seven more such candidates out of incumbent MPs, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves need to think on.
2015, 2017, 2019, all the Tories said was they wouldn't put up taxes as much as Miliband or Corbyn, even that turned out it wasn't true. Middle England takes to the streets against cuts, never does that for tax cuts.
ReplyDeleteIt is not that there ever really are tax cuts. People vaguely like the idea of them. But they virulently dislike the very concrete reality of spending cuts.
DeleteAll the worst people are on the Treasury Bench to hear Reeves.
ReplyDeleteIt is useful to have all the ghouls in one place. Behind them are nepo babies who have no idea why anyone would need the winter fuel payment. Come the next General Election, the pensioners will not blame a Government that had left office five years earlier. Nor should they.
DeleteLiz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng tried to abolish the 45p income tax rate, look how that turned out.
ReplyDeleteQuite. The mere suggestion of it and of the related measures. At least they were never enacted.
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