Conventional wisdom says you can’t sell a tax rise. The public won’t buy it, the media will torch it and the opposition will call it theft. Yet history says otherwise. With the right story, taking more has, time and again, been made to sound like giving back. That’s the task at hand for Rachel Reeves. For two centuries, chancellors have found stories and postures through which to turn pain into purpose: the doctor’s cure, the general’s campaign, the preacher’s sermon, the pilot’s controls, the manager’s repair job. Each tried to make paying up feel like doing good.
It began with Robert Peel, who reintroduced income tax in 1842. He cast the nation as patient and taxation as cure – “a great resource in time of necessity” – and the Treasury as surgeon. Yet he also spoke as preacher, warning of the “mighty and growing evil” of national debt as a moral as well as economic burden. By 1909, the sickroom had given way to the battlefield. David Lloyd George’s “People’s Budget” was presented as “a war Budget… for raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness”. Taxation became a crusade; the state, a general leading a righteous campaign.
Half a century later, the martial tone remained. Raising income tax in 1975 as part of his “war on inflation,” Denis Healey turned fiscal restraint into national struggle, warning that it would be “a hard Budget for all of us in Britain”. His language was grimly patriotic: collective toughness against a shared enemy.
But as postwar solidarity faded, arguments shifted from moral persuasion to managerial reassurance. By 1981, Geoffrey Howe’s Budget had replaced grand emotion at the despatch box with calm control. He described his windfall taxes as making it possible to “steer a course” and “maintain balance”. The moral grandeur was gone; in its place stood the chancellor as pilot and mechanic, fine-tuning the machine.
By the early 2000s, the cockpit had become a boardroom. Gordon Brown’s National Insurance rise in his 2002 budget was framed as “an investment in a world-class NHS”. The taxpayer became a reluctant shareholder; the chancellor a fund manager. Rishi Sunak similarly described his corporation tax increases as “investment” in 2021. Virtue was now expressed in the grammar of return.
Reeves inherits this narrower vocabulary. Like George Osborne before her, she speaks of “fixing the foundations”. The nation is no longer a patient or an army or a congregation but a semi-detached with damp. The work is unending, unglamorous, slightly shameful. You don’t rebuild. You prevent collapse. Across Europe, the same managerial tone surrounds taxation. Spain’s Pedro Sánchez talks of sharing the load fairly while Italy’s Giorgia Meloni defends her windfall tax on banks’ unjust margins. The old invocations of sacrifice and crusade have given way to balance sheets and civic hygiene.
After years of austerity, pandemic and scandal, perhaps the older metaphors feel spent. The doctor’s authority is weakened by corrupt PPE contracts, the preacher’s authority by Partygate and trust in the accountant ruined by Trussonomics. To justify a tax rise is to humanise coercion – to turn revenue into morality. It only works when people believe that sacrifice is redeemed by common purpose. “You can’t just dump it on people,” said Alistair Darling of his 2009 hike on higher earners. In his memoir, Gordon Brown was bleaker still: “I fell short in communicating my ideas. I failed to rally the nation.”
Reeves knows she cannot afford that failure. This moment more than a fiscal test. If she can present a story of tax rises not as a technocratic fix but as a fair contribution to collective protection, she could begin to restore a sense that government still has moral purpose. If she cannot, she risks proving the populists right: that taxation is what power does to people, not what citizens do for one another.
Reeves must find a way to articulate that contribution can make giving feel like belonging again. The Chancellor could do worse than to reach back into the stories her predecessors told about tax. Not to borrow their outdated grandeur, but to recover their faith that a nation can still be moved by something larger than self-interest.
[Further reading: Just raise tax]
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