Idiots of Britain unite against this rising tide of dependency and waste

Tory orthodoxies are being sacrificed by Rishi Sunak as part of a safety-first strategy to minimise electoral losses

Are you an idiot or a loon, or perhaps both? Rishi Sunak seems to think it idiotic to want to cut taxes in the current economic climate while William Hague, former Conservative leader, implied in a newspaper column that those demanding lower revenues when state spending is being pushed remorselessly upwards were loons.

Tory orthodoxies are being sacrificed to a veneer of pragmatism and competence. After the selfimplosion of Boris Johnson and the 44-day insurgency of Truss and Kwarteng, normal, sensible Toryism has resumed, with normal, sensible people back in charge.

The strengths of the Conservative Party are once more to the fore – no ideology, no clever-dickism, just rational, feet-on-the-ground governance that doesn’t frighten the horses, or the voters for that matter. Mr Sunak will be judged by five pledges, all reasonable and all achievable, apart from the one about the little boats, of course.

This is less a programme for victory than one intended to limit the scale of an expected defeat. Some of the more outlandish predictions recently had the Tories winning fewer than 100 seats at the next general election. One poll had them returning just 69 MPS. That is an extinction-level event. Even in the wipe-out of 1997, they managed 160 seats and it still took almost 20 years to claw their way back to an overall, but narrow, majority.

Under 100 seats and the party would be doomed. I can’t see that happening to the most successful political party in the world, with an unerring instinct for self-preservation. The received wisdom was that a lot of southern Tory voters who backed the Lib Dems in by-elections and local council polls would return once Boris had left office, and they still might. But since Mr Sunak came to power 100 days ago, the polls have hardly shifted, with Labour leading by more than 20 per cent.

Some Tory optimists hope the next election will be more like 1992, when fear of a tax-and-spend Labour government taking office in the middle of a recession drove Middle England to give John Major the biggest popular vote in history. A myth has grown since that Labour was cruising to victory only to founder on the rocks of Neil Kinnock’s triumphalist Sheffield rally speech.

But the polls before the 1992 election tell the real story. For the 16 months after Mrs Thatcher’s departure, the gap between Tory and Labour was never more than 4 per cent. What we are seeing now is much more like the run-up to 1997, when the polls regularly had Labour 25 or 30 points clear.

There are differences. In 1997, Labour were defending 271 seats and in striking distance of a victory which became a landslide. In 2019, they won only 202 seats and need another 124 to win a majority of just one. They also had 49 MPS in Scotland in 1997. With the rise of the SNP, they would need to win almost all the required additional seats in England, a tall order as Conservative incumbents are defending safer majorities than they were then.

So even with a Blair-style triumph, Starmer would be lucky to end up with a majority of 40. Assuming the Tories have not lost dozens of seats to the Lib Dems, this is a result they could live with. Harold Wilson lost by a similar margin in 1970 and stayed on as Opposition leader to win again; Sunak may be hoping to do the same.

The Conservative leadership’s “safety first” approach may make perfect sense as an electoral stratagem, especially if the economy stabilises, energy prices fall and inflation comes down. But there is more to it than that. They now seem to accept that the levels of spending we have are not only unavoidable but will get higher and taxes will, therefore, always need to rise to sustain them.

Of course, when the country is up to its neck in debt, borrowing even more to cut taxes is mad because no one will lend to us. But what happened to the spending side of the ledger, the bit the Tories were supposed to keep under a tight rein? It is not good enough to blame the pandemic splurge on furlough because we were spending far too much before Covid.

The internal pollsters that ministers consult like some latter-day soothsayers doubtless tell them that voters like public services and will not take kindly to their being cut. They want welfare and a paternalistic, big-spending state. Given that 54 per cent take more out than they put in, that is hardly a surprise.

However, the people who pay for all this, the self-employed, the entrepreneurs, the middle-income professionals who spent the weekend filling in their self-assessment returns, are entitled to ask where the money goes. If our taxes were funding first-rate health treatment, world-class schooling and top-of-the-range social care or were being used to fill potholes, clean up the streets and fight crime effectively then it might seem worth it.

But when a chunk of it goes to expand the ranks of pointless bureaucracy, is lost in another Whitehall procurement fiasco or sustains levels of welfare dependency never dreamt of by William Beveridge, it is a tad annoying to be called a moron for suggesting something is done about it. Our system of governance has become characterised by grotesque waste, unfulfilled promises, incompetent delivery and excessive regulation. It has over-reached itself and seems incapable of retrenching, even under a Tory prime minister.

People understand the nature of a progressive tax system but it has to be fair to all, including contributors. Socialists think they know best how to spend people’s money and should be entrusted to do so. That is the essence of the Left’s worldview. It is the task of the Conservatives to oppose it, not succumb to it.

Tory politicians should not be ashamed to talk about cutting taxes. They used to make a moral case for low taxation that feeds a desire for smaller government and greater personal freedom. Lower taxes allow people to make their own decisions, to save when they wish, to give if they choose, and to spend on what matters to them. Where is the morality in taking money from people so politicians can feel good about themselves, hailing their “generosity” when they announce more spending? Maybe it’s time for a new political movement, the ILP – Idiots and Loons Party. Any joiners?

Where is the morality in taking money from people so that politicians can feel good about themselves?