How much longer will the Tories go on bleeding middle-class taxpayers?

THIS week’s announcement by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt that NHS spending will rise by £ 20 billion a year has been greeted by Tory cheers around Westminster.

His supporters believe Mr Hunt deserves huge praise for taking the wind out of the sails of Jeremy Corbyn and Labour by going to the rescue of the cash-starved National Health Service.

Perhaps, although early polls suggest that the political gain for the Conservatives is actually likely to be limited.

Yes, it is for a good cause, but still I worry about this massive pile of new cash for health.

At this delicate moment in our national finances, I believe it is morally wrong — and that view would hold good whatever department was being showered with money.

For if the Conservative Party stands for anything, it is keeping public spending under control and keeping taxes down, because individuals almost always spend their money more wisely than governments.

That is one of the key lessons of economic history, which shows that growth is higher when tax rates are lower.

This philosophy has been embedded in Conservative thinking ever since Margaret Thatcher. But sadly it’s now being abandoned under her successor in Downing Street, Theresa May. In short, the decision to give the NHS a cash boost via higher taxes is a betrayal of core Conservative beliefs.

Expenditure of so much more money means undoing all the hard work carried out over the past eight years to improve the national finances.

Britain’s budget is finally in surplus for the first time in 16 years, but this spending splurge surely threatens to drag us back into the red.

Worse still, the new policy was imposed on the public in a shambolic way, with the extra spending announced before the Government had actually worked out whereabouts the money was coming from.

Would it come from a so-called ‘Brexit dividend’ if we ever stop paying into Brussels’ coffers? More borrowing? Or will it, as most of us fear, be the result of higher taxes?

As every family knows, you should only splash out on a new car or home extension once you know exactly where the money is coming from.

This week’s sudden announcement on NHS spending betrays a contempt for the millions of taxpayers who have done more than anybody else to carry the burden of bringing down the deficit incurred by the financial crisis ten years ago.

For despite having Conservative prime ministers for the past eight years, nothing has been done to help middle-income earners. No cuts in income tax. No cuts in VAT.

On the contrary, more and more people are being sucked into high bands of taxation. The figures are shocking. Over the course of the past decade, despite growth in wages, the level at which the 40 per cent tax band is applied has changed little. No wonder the middle classes feel worse off!

Now, it’s being predicted by the Institute for Fiscal Studies that an extra 400,000 people could be dragged into the 40p income tax band in just two years because of the freezing of allowances while wages continue to rise.

To add insult to injury, the tax-free personal allowance has almost doubled from £6,000 a year to just under £ 12,000 in the past ten years.

Admirable motives lie behind this shift, because well-meaning people understandably believe that the poorest people in our society should be excluded from paying tax.

Yes, it’s well-intentioned, but wrong. Because if people pay no taxes they have no reason to vote wisely on the way politicians spend their money.

Indeed, if you do not contribute to the Exchequer, you have every incentive to support the party that promises to spend the most State money on you and your family.

Today, the raised level of tax-free personal allowance means the average household in Yorkshire and the Humber receives £566 more in benefits a year than it pays in taxes.

This cannot be right. (Just as it is not right, by the way, that the immoral rich can salt their income away in tax havens and get away with not making a fair contribution.)

I do agree with Mrs May about one thing. Yes, the NHS needs more money. And I can see that the political strategists who advised the Prime Minister believed they were being clever in stealing the political high ground from Jeremy Corbyn. B

ut in doing so, they have made an unnecessary concession to Mr Corbyn’s madcap brand of reckless economics. (Mind you, not even Corbyn was deranged enough to think that NHS spending should be raised by £20 billion a year.)

It’s not going too far to say that last week Britain lurched from the necessary economics of austerity to the long-discredited politics of tax and spend.

For the past decade, the British people have struggled bravely to reduce public spending in order to deal with the mess inherited from Gordon Brown’s Labour government.

Those who have suffered most are, as usual, the squeezed middle classes: decent people who pay their taxes, work hard and bring up their children to be honest citizens. These people, the heart of middle England, are now being taken for granted by Theresa May’s Conservative Party.

This is not just dishonest politics. It’s also very bad economics. Because, in the long term, the middle classes don’t just pay a very large slice of our taxes. They also generate our national wealth.

And too often, all they receive in return is a slap in the face.