Much was left ambiguous (just what is “public control”?) But a former New Labour special adviser knows the suggestive force of the English language. Wider still, and wider? Andy Burnham ran to be prime minister with unbounded ambitions for the British state. Four decades of neoliberal policies would be rolled back. Council houses would be built, the north reindustrialised and a struggling water supplier nationalised.
A man who prides himself on having the common touch, Mr Burnham might check out the British Social Attitudes survey, which has been asking the same questions about taxes and spending since 1983. At 37% of gdp, the tax burden is the highest since 1948.
In Mr Osborne’s era, America’s Tea Party movement of populists and libertarians coined the backronym “taxed enough already”. Britain lacks the organisation or the “don’t tread on me” placards, but it has the mood. Take social care, which Mr Burnham has suggested could be fixed “if everybody on the nhs principle contributed a little”. Or, as he put it, he promises “the biggest change in our lifetimes to the way the country is run and it is consistent with the 2024 manifesto”. “The public didn’t want Stafford Cripps-style drinking our own urine,” wrote Boris Johnson, a big-spending prime minister who pretended the previous decade of hairshirted Tory government had never happened.
It charts how the public has responded to government spending like a thermostat-twiddler, clicking on and off in response to cycles of largesse and restraint. When politicians spend too much, or too little, the electorate reliably pushes back. In sum: a prime minister with the most expansive ambitions for the state since the 1970s faces the most hawkish public since the Tory chancellor George Osborne bestrode Westminster with a scythe. Rarely has such a mismatch existed between a prime minister’s ambitions and the public’s appetite to pay for them. Tea time has arrived. The backlash is no surprise. Voters may appear delusional in demanding tax restraint at a moment when the bond markets have the Treasury on notice and an ageing population is straining the public finances. But for Christopher Wlezien, the academic who first spotted the thermostatic views of American taxpayers, it is a sign of a healthy democracy. Voters have a clear idea of what size state they want, and they know when it has got out of whack. For all the fears of declining media literacy, when it comes to tax, the public senses when the room is too hot. Tea time ill suits a prime minister who aspires to great social reforms. Britons agree that the social-care system is broken, but only a minority are willing to pay more to fix it. Free at the point of use is not a proposition with popular support. Doubtless he knows this. But Mr Burnham’s party has never really answered the painful question of what it means to be a Labour government in an age of fiscal restraint. And so, while promising to roll back neoliberalism, Mr Burnham also promised to stick to his predecessor’s pledge not to increase the four taxes that account for the bulk of government revenues. His project has the logic of an Escher print. The Conservatives find it easier to govern when the public favours largesse than Labour does when people crave restraint. In office, Tories follow the thermostat wherever it points. His colleagues fretted that he had broken the thermostat, leaving Britons hooked on furloughs and subsidies. They needn’t have worried. Duly, the thermostat clicked again. And so Kemi Badenoch enjoys the rarest of fortunes: being a Tory leader facing a Labour prime minister who hankers for a larger state and a public unwilling to pay for it. In government she would face an invidious inheritance: any administration will need a chunky mix of spending cuts and tax rises to stabilise the public finances. But tea time is a fine time to be a Tory in opposition. It would take unusual incompetence to mess it up.
