Boris Johnson faced a slew of sceptical headlines from the rightwing press on Wednesday morning, as his former employers at the Telegraph claimed he was shifting the Tories “away from sound money, low taxes, free markets, and individualism”.
The prime minister appeared to have quelled a rebellion on his backbenches, for the time being, over the hike to national insurance. Conservative MPs were unhappy but not mutinous.
However, his policies had a tough reception in much of the Tory press, including the Telegraph, where he formerly worked as a Brussels correspondent and columnist, and which is known to be his favoured newspaper.
By international standards, taxes in the UK are relatively modest. The amount taken by the state will be around 35% of national income following the decision to bring in a new health and social care levy, which puts Britain in the bottom half of the league table and well behind the 40%-plus rates in France and the Scandinavian nations.
By the UK’s own standards, however, the tax take is historically high. On a sustained basis, it is necessary to go back to the immediate aftermath of the second world war to find a time when tax as a share of gross domestic product stood at 35% – and at that time the trend was sharply down.
Carl Emmerson, the deputy director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said there was no comparable data for the period before the second world war but the tax take was almost certainly lower. “It was much cheaper to run an empire than a welfare state,” he said.
The tax take fell after 1945 for two reasons. Peacetime required a smaller state and the economy grew by around 3% on average. A country’s tax “burden” depends not just on whether taxes are going up or down but how fast the economy is expanding and so by the end of the 1950s the tax-to-GDP ratio was down to 27% of GDP. Higher government spending in the 10 years that followed meant higher taxes, which briefly hit 35% of GDP at the end of the 1960s, and remained only just below that level when Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979.
There was then another 15-year decline in tax as a share of national income taking it once again below 30% by 1994. Since then, the trend has been steadily upwards, with only a few temporary dips.
Its main headline said Johnson was presiding over the highest taxes since the war, with a front-page piece from the political writer Camilla Tominey saying the UK had “just witnessed the PM sound the death knell for Conservatism”. Describing him as a “cobalt Corbyn”, her scathing verdict on the prime minister and his policy was that “perhaps the most shameful part of it was that Boris Johnson seemed to feel no shame at all”.
In its leader, the Telegraph view was a little more tempered, but it questioned whether Tory MPs should be supporting a change in the philosophy of the Conservative party.
It said: “They will be voting on whether to endorse a fundamental – and potentially permanent – shift in the nature of the Tory party, away from sound money, low taxes, free markets, and individualism, and towards something entirely new. Mr Johnson clearly thinks he has the charisma to pull it off. Are his MPs so sure?”
The Times front page followed a similar line to the Telegraph, highlighting that the “tax burden will rise to highest in 70 years”. In its leader, the newspaper said Johnson was gambling both that voters would forgive the breaking of manifesto promises and that a tax hike would solve the problems with the NHS and social care. It said the move would “make it nigh on impossible for the Tories to go into the next election claiming to be the party of low taxation” and added: “There can be little doubt that the Tories will pay a high political price if this backlog is not resolved and waiting times reduced before the next election.”
The Sun described it as “BoJo’s biggest gamble”, saying Johnson had “gambled his political future with £36bn of un-Conservative tax rises”. Meanwhile, the Daily Mail highlighted its own role in campaigning for the social care crisis to be fixed but also labelled the move as “PM’s care tax bombshell” and criticised the delayed start date of 2023.
The only supportive rightwing paper was the Daily Express, which led on a promise from the health secretary, Sajid Javid, not to waste a single penny of the extra cash for the NHS and social care.
