If you wanted a single poll to explain how we all got into this mess, you could do worse than the YouGov one dated 2 June. Asked what they think should be done about defence spending, 49% of British voters think it should be increased, 22% that it should remain the same and only 11% that it should decrease. That, for a question about a normally abstruse corner of public policy, feels a fairly compelling result.
Asked their views on who should pay for it, though, and the picture gets a lot cloudier: only 29% support an increase in taxes on people like themselves, while 57% oppose it. Restrict the poll to those who say they strongly hold those views, those numbers become 6% strongly support, 33% strongly oppose. That, there, is British politics in a nutshell. We want the thing. We just think someone else should pay for the thing.
I suspect you could repeat this exercise with most bits of public policy. Many people worry about the social care system that may await them or their loved ones in old age, not to mention terrible pay rates for those who work there. But nobody thinks that they are the ones who should put their hands in their pockets to fix it, and any politician who suggests otherwise is effectively signing their own suicide note. And so the local councils that built so much of this country continue their gradual transformation into insolvent social care funding bodies with an unprofitable side hustle in bins.
It’s not that people don’t understand that these things cost money: it’s just money that they assume will come from elsewhere. I’m unavoidably reminded of the 1998 episode of The Simpsons in which Homer is elected sanitation commissioner after campaigning under the slogan “Can’t someone else do it?” and promptly ruins the town.
If the public are deluded about the mismatch between the demands they place on the state, and the taxes they’re willing to pay, then they’ve been encouraged in this delusion by the political class. The economic booms of Thatcher were built on unrepeatable giveaways of state assets or tax cuts funded by North Sea oil. New Labour used the proceeds of big finance to rebuild the state while keeping income taxes low, which worked brilliantly, until one day it didn’t. Then David Cameron and George Osborne preached austerity and the need to shrink the state, all the while making sure that the bits that mattered to their voters remained protected. At every point, those in power have been distinctly reluctant to tell the electorate the awkward truth that they might need to contribute more.
After all that, is it any wonder that we ended up with Boris Johnson, a prime minister who’d elevated cake-ism into an ideology? For decades the public has been told they can have US tax rates and European public services. The country has been led somewhere closer to the opposite.
The current government has two big problems. (Actually, it has dozens, but let’s focus on two.) One is in having inherited a mess. The other is the lack of a clear message or organising principle. At risk of committing the columnist’s cardinal sin (“This latest news shows why they should do what I’ve always wanted them to do anyway”), I think there’s a single solution to both these problems:
Tell the truth. Be the government that levels with the electorate about what it and can’t do with current levels of resources, and what choices we realistically have about the future. Tell them that, as things stand, the state is broken, and that if we want to fix it we have to pay.
That would make it easier to make the case for the further tax rises that, I’m sorry, are almost certainly coming. It would allow the Prime Minister to adopt a tone of moral seriousness that fits both the geopolitical moment and his own personality, while framing Reform and the Tories as an irresponsible bunch of chancers treating the electorate like children.
And it’d help sell the painful choices that lie ahead. Being able to explain things like the now reversed Winter Fuel Allowance cuts would never have made them popular – but it would at least make them explicable. Without the narrative to explain it, policies like that just look mean.
I’m not saying “if you want to fix stuff, we’ll all need to contribute more” will be popular: if it were, someone would have tried it by now. But it does at least have the advantage of being true. The government is almost certainly going to have to raise taxes: they have to find a way to do it.
[See more: Abortion’s unwelcome return to British politics]
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