In Britain, the ‘Conservatives’ Are so Lost The Left is Credibly Attacking Them on Tax and Migration Being too High

LONDON, ENGLAND - MARCH 06: UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, left smiles with UK Chancellor
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Oliver JJ Lane

It’s election time in Britain, so the Tories have dusted down their long-neglected conservative rhetoric, but there’s a real problem: their track record in government betrays the truth, allowing the left to maul them on their own key policy areas. Welcome to topsy-turvy Britain.

Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) Jeremy Hunt stood up in Parliament and gave it his best for an hour, talking the talk and promising so much more in the future, if only the British people would vote him in again later this year. It all sounded superficially great, a Conservative party chancellor speaking in full-throated support of conservative principles. You’d be hard-pressed to find disagreement with:

If we want to encourage hard work, we should let people keep as much of their own money as possible. We look around the world at economies in North America and Asia and notice that countries with lower taxes generally have higher growth.

Economists argue about cause and correlation. But we know that lower taxed economies have more energy, more dynamism and more innovation. We know that is Britain’s future too.

Great! And then there was a very clear implication that he intended — in the fullness of time — to abolish the “unfairness” of taxing income twice by eventually doing away with National Insurance because, in the UK, money earned from work has tax removed from it two times before it even hits your bank account. Very encouraging… assuming this government still exists by the time “when it is responsible, when it can be achieved without increasing borrowing and when it can be delivered without compromising high-quality public services” rolls around, which it almost certainly won’t.

The problem is that no amount of very clearly right-wing language today can really mask what has been a very left-wing government in execution. Taxation and mass migration have soared, and people feel considerably poorer — these are the key selling points of a right-wing party at election time and anyone can see they’ve not just been failed, but in many cases haven’t even been attempted.

As a right-wing politician, you must surely take time to stop and self-assess when you’re being credibly attacked from the left on your performance in these areas. While politicking by the Scottish Nationalists (in what may be considered by some to be a perfectly reasonable act of political revenge) to deprive the Labour opposition leader of making a reply to Hunt’s budget while anyone except a small handful of political nerds still had the television turned on, Sir Keir’s response was still credible and damaging. Expect to see highlights clipped and shared, and the key lines repeated ad nauseam as we roll towards this year’s general election.

Keir Starmer said this afternoon:

…when the chancellor says Britain has grown more quickly than countries like Germany over the last 14 years, I’m sure they will be shocked to learn that this is a statistical slight of hand. When it comes to GDP per capita, in other words the growth that makes the difference to the pockets of working people, their record is much worse. Indeed, in per capita terms our economy has not grown since the first quarter of 2022. The longest period of stagnation Britain has seen since 1955.

If the party opposite really wants to know what hides in the Chancellor’s spreadsheets, then they will see it’s only the record levels of migration they have delivered which has prevented an even deeper decline, and that is the record they must stand on at the election.

Because while on these benches we do not demean for a second the contribution migrants make to a thriving economy, it is high time the party opposite was honest with the British public about the role immigration plays in their economy policy, because right now in terms of growth that is all they have. There is nothing else.

Ouch. The awkward bit for the Conservatives is, it’s true. Indeed, from the Tories’ addiction to migration as a false friend of the economy, to flatlining GDP per capita, and the Tories giving away tiny tax cuts with one hand while raking in cash by stealth grabs with the other, this is all what you’ll have been reading about on Breitbart London for years.

To visualise the crushing, slow-motion disaster of stealth taxation — fiscal drag, in other words — consider this, as noted last year:

The impact of this, which has been going on for decades but has reached “totally unprecedented” levels under the present Conservative administration, is best seen in the upper tax bracket, which was first created decades ago to punish the super-wealthy. Today, a failure to adjust the threshold as inflation soars has seen upper-working and middle-class occupations like teachers, nurses, and police officers dragged into the punishment band.

As late as 2003 not a single nurse in the UK paid tax in the top band, but a decade later tens of thousands did, and now hundreds of thousands do. Nurses are not meaningfully any wealthier in 2023 than 20 years ago, but they are taxed more.

By 2028, it is thought a fifth of all taxpayers will be paying the 40 per cent higher tax rate once meant only for the very wealthy.

If only there was a political party in the United Kingdom that really was invested in controlling migration and shrinking the state. Because for all their on-the-nose hits landed on the Tories today, it surely isn’t Labour.

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