The Conservative Party Manifesto is being launched today and looks set to announce £30 billion in tax cuts over the next 5 years. This will include a 2p cut in employees' national insurance and will be funded by a £12 billion welfare squeeze and £6 billion raised from tackling tax avoidance. That the Conservative Party already promised this in 2015 has not been missed by the media. You also don’t need to be a maths genius to realise that £12 billion and £6 billion do not add up to £30 billion.
So how will these tax cuts be funded? Well, the truth is that they will be funded by continuing to freeze the income tax thresholds, which is pushing more and more people into the higher tax brackets. According to the IFS, in 1991-92 3.5% of UK adults (1.6 million) paid the higher rate of income tax. By 2022-23 11% (6.1 million) were paying higher rates, with that figure set to reach 14% (7.8 million) by 2027-28. This means that by 2027, one in five taxpayers, one in four teachers, and one in eight nurses, will pay the higher-rate tax.
As Isaac Delestre, Research Economist at the IFS, has said: “For income tax, the story of the last 30 years has been one of higher-rate tax going from being something reserved for only the very richest, to something that a much larger proportion of adults can expect to encounter.”
Rather than having cut taxes over their last 14 years in government, the Tories have in fact raised taxes to the highest level since the 1940s, with a greater number of aspiring middle-class voters being penalised for their hard work and success. For this reason and others, many voters have lost trust in Tory promises. Many disillusioned Tory voters will see their planned cuts to national insurance and capital gains tax as bribes designed to obscure and distract from their many failures in office.
From immigration to healthcare and housing, the Tories have failed to deliver on their promises. They’ve failed to control immigration, they’ve failed to fix the NHS, and they’ve failed to build enough housing. British voters don’t just care about the money in their pockets, but even if they did only care about money, they’d still find themselves short-changed. The average Briton is worse off than they were in 2007 when UK GDP per capita was the same as the US. Since then, the UK has stagnated, whereas US GDP per capita has increased by $30,000.
With such a terrible record in government, the only thing the Conservatives have left to offer is a big bribe to voters, especially those who are thinking of voting for Reform UK. Yet, by cynically trying to bribe voters with tax cuts, Rishi Sunak has misread their priorities. Yes, voters care about the money in their pockets, but they also care about well-run public services, affordable housing, national defence, crime, and immigration. During the 2016 EU referendum, the Remain campaign tried to scare voters into thinking they’d be worse off if we left the EU. Yet 16.4 million voters were willing to take that risk and voted to leave the EU because they cared about national sovereignty. Many of the same Leave voters will now be voting for Reform and will not be bribed by Sunak into supporting his globalist mass-immigration agenda.
The Prime Minister has been keen to emphasise his Rwanda deportation plan, yet since 2022 only one illegal migrant has been deported there. Unless the British government commits to leaving both the ECHR and Refugee Convention, and to remove the opportunity for appeals then deportations will be held up in the courts indefinitely. In the first five months of this year, close to 10,500 people have arrived illegally in the UK in small boats, 12% more than in the same period in 2022. This is despite Sunak’s promise in 2022 to “stop the boats”.
On legal immigration as well, voters can see that the numbers are simply unsustainable. The last ONS estimates put long-term net migration at 685,000 in 2023. This has not only exacerbated Britain’s housing crisis but has also put a strain on community tensions with antisemitic hatred soaring and Islamists chanting jihad on our streets. Anyone who has been reading the news and watching the weekly anti-Israel protests can see that there is a large number of Muslims who have failed to assimilate into British society. For this to be addressed the UK has to not only drastically cut immigration but also create an assimilation strategy that will reduce religious and ethnic tensions and ensure that Britain can return to being a unified country with a unified culture.
Border security and immigration control are the issues Reform voters care about most, not taxation. And if Sunak thinks he can bribe them with tax cuts, he’s in for a surprise.