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Silk purses out of sows’ ears: the Tory tax fantasy
As we round off party conference season in Britain, there are reasons to be cheerful. Based on their performances at conference, for example, it appears the UK finally has a PM and Leader of the Opposition with some semblance of performative polish in their media appearances. Increasingly, these mainstream leaders are developing well-curated and well-managed presences in the public eye. Essential to frontline politics, you might think, but this marks a turning point from the years of Sausage Starmer, Petrol Pump Sunak, and Pork Markets Truss. Boris Johnson was a different kettle of fish altogether, appearing to relish the limelight, but basing his personal ‘brand’ on the persona of the disruptive schoolboy that no teacher could ever like. It would be hard to say any of these politicians put the political theatre of the UK in a good light.
So today our chief out-of-touch weirdos appear to have gotten better at pretending to look sensible. Is that really such a big deal? Perhaps not, but in many respects it can make domestic politics a little easier to engage with. New PM Andy Burnham, for example, appears to be working hard at showing the country what can be achieved when a government actually invests its political capital into governing. Burnham’s general media presence and his recent conference speech and policy announcements around social care seemed to strike a real chord with the party and public.
Leader of the official Opposition, Kemi Badenoch, also had a good showing in the recent Conservative Party conference. She made a solid case for just how destructive and unserious their big competitor, Reform UK, is as a political outfit. She scored points off Conservative deserters like Suella Braverman by highlighting what a busted flush they really are.
However, there was something troublesome about what the Conservatives offered at their conference, which speaks to a deep-rooted and dangerous ideological obsession within their political programme. In particular, Shadow Chancellor Andrew Griffith’s speech gave a glimpse of what sits behind the more polished veneer of his party leader. Griffith made a big splash by announcing that he would ‘scrap at least one tax every single budget’ if he were to become Chancellor. Yet governments rely primarily on two sources for cash: borrowing and taxation. There is an influential consensus that the UK has reached unsustainably high levels of borrowing. So why would Griffith apparently alienate himself from the realities of the Treasury by adopting a position like this?
Griffith said he wanted to focus on ‘tax cuts that help growth, tax cuts that improve incentives to work, tax cuts that make life simpler and fairer’. But neither this nor the vague condition that any tax cuts could only happen ‘when we can afford to do so’ obscures that such an idea can only come from a blindly ideologically-motivated anti-tax position at heart. In substance, Griffith was implying that he was aware of the dangers of it, but was nonetheless pumping out political messaging that governing with stability was less of a concern than indulging ideological fantasies of regular arbitrary tax cuts. Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng would be proud.
The UK’s need for economic growth may be an unavoidable fact of government, but this particular approach to tax is not. For one thing, such an approach misses the fact that many other drags on the UK economy need addressing. For another, Griffith’s reference to the everyday pains taxation exerts on the public is misplaced. He bemoaned the time stolen when “filling in a tax return or hanging on an HMRC helpline” but in doing so entirely missed the point. Ordinary people do not get the luxury of making an ideological enemy out of tax as Griffith does. They know they have to engage with the tax system – as both contributors and service users – but they are forced into a labyrinth of sclerotic and inefficient bureaucracy that could be improved, ironically enough, with some additional resources funded by tax.
Indeed, for 14 years under the Conservatives the orthodoxy of the day was to cut spending and treat tax like the enemy. And it left us in the very state the UK is in today, with depleted and defunct public services and a reliance on national debt for funding the business of government, including future potential tax cuts. Ultimately, it becomes difficult to avoid the conclusion that Griffith and the Conservative Party have a jaded view of taxation’s potential to provide good quality services for the public and level playing fields across society. This explains Griffith’s spin on VAT on public school fees as a ‘spiteful’ move, rather than a potential social equaliser that could help fund state education.
The reality is, in the years to come there may need to be space for tax rises somewhere, especially if they help reduce the national debt burden and allow investment to flow to the critical infrastructure and services that are about to crumble under our very feet. To grandstand a policy of consistently and arbitrarily reducing tax simply because anti-taxation tropes appeal to your narrow sensibilities is an extremely dangerous thing for a government to consider.
Of course, one conference speech does not make for an entire policy platform, but it does speak to the sort of thinking in the party. We can write Griffith off as a dangerous ideologue, but he is also a reminder that the Conservative Party – which, after all, has elevated him to this position – is an organisation that permits and celebrates this type of thinking.
So while leaders in mainstream British politics today may have a bit more polish than their predecessors, for Conservatives in particular it masks an inability to develop practical solutions for government and an infatuation with their own indoctrination.
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