Why are the Tories afraid of taxation?

The Conservatives’ phobia of tax rises is what stops us from being the party of aspiration.

By Jake Dibden

Over the course of the last year, the government has had to increase rates of taxation which, as with any sniff of tax rises, caused outrage amongst members of the Conservative Party. For some reason, born out of nostalgia for the brutal free-market, low-tax economics of Thatcher, and the fetishisation of Reaganomics, even the youngest members of the Conservative Party see increases in taxation on personal wealth as being inherently contradictory to our position as the “party of aspiration”, particularly taxation which effects the already wealthy and the elderly.

Take the furlough scheme, for example: almost every member of the party agreed that it was an unavoidable necessity. The majority of people in the UK do not have significant enough personal assets or savings to fall back on and the loss of 6 months’ pay, job security and record-high unemployment that the Job Retention Scheme prevented would have caused mass hunger and poverty on a scale not seen since the Great Depression.

Secondly, the effect of a nationwide lockdown to the economy, whilst causing a seismic collapse in GDP, would have been far worse if the government had allowed the unemployment rate to go up, which would have prevented the economy from recovering for years if not decades.

So now we have got around to talking about how we pay the bill for all the lovely policies that we lusted over the Chancellor for, what does the membership want?

We want to reverse all of the good that these policies have done, by cutting taxes and cutting spending.

We cannot allow ourselves to go back to austerity Britain, where funding for health and education was decimated, police numbers fell and youth services were cut. People struggling to live on welfare payments designed for a family of three or four, just because they happened to have three children instead of two. Where the UK was struggling to recover from the recession, let alone grow.

I joined the Conservatives in 2019 because, for the first time since I was born we had a leader and a cabinet who saw the benefits of a free-market economy, but in the context of its evils.

We had become a party who understood that there are people who are systematically excluded from, and priced out of, success and that austerity economics held back the most intelligent, hard-working and skilled people. A party who promoted business and entrepreneurship, as well as pro-worker and pro-consumer policies.

The party of aspiration … for all. A party who respected and cared about you regardless of your reliance on government services.

So why is it that now we are ready to eviscerate the Chancellor because he would prefer to tax those who already have so that he doesn’t have to take away the education, protection and healthcare of those who don’t?

So if you have to pay an additional few pence on every pound you earn from your £30,000-£50,000 a year white-collar, metropolitan job just so the government can feed the unemployed, without having to murder the NHS or castrate the education system, then I’m sorry, but I’ll take your additional few pence.

Taxation is not theft, it is our communal pooling of resources to invest in a system that helps those who need it. We do this because we know that we may one day need this system.

Believing in taxation is not socialism, it does not sacrifice our place as the party of aspiration, so either grow a backbone or a soul, and stand behind this government because, for the first time in years, I have a party I can trust to let me reach for the stars, but not explode if I come crashing back to Earth.

Jake Dibden (Committee Member) is a first-year History and Politics student at Trinity College.