From the pen of Charlie Protheroe

What is the point of the Conservative Party? It was a question asked in Parliament by Sir Edward Leigh in response to Jeremy Hunt’s reversal of the mini-budget. At the moment, the answer appears to be that the Conservative Party is a caretaker – something that is better than the Labour Party, but at best is effectively just waiting until either the world is a better place and one more conducive to implementing ideas, and at worst is waiting for some ideas to even come their way. It is hard to see any longer what the Conservatives are offering that Labour, once again now under “sensible” leadership, would not. Where is the pursuit of individual freedom and the empowering of individuals? Policies that ban adverts for certain food or increase taxes on tastier fizzy drinks are the treating humans as unable to make their own decisions. The last few years have also seen a total divorce from the idea that the state should not step in at any and all possible opportunities. First came the...

 There are economic and moral arguments both for and against taxes. The economic argument will always be a consequentialist one and will always be essentially academic, and so essentially infinitely arguable. All we can know for sure is that the truth will lie somewhere in the Goldilocks zone: too much tax will be economically counterproductive, while too little tax will fail to cover the minimal costs necessary to maintain a functioning state. The debate around this has been going on for centuries and will continue to rage for as long as there is a spectrum of economic beliefs. However, perhaps more interestingly, and certainly less commonly, is the moral debate around taxes. Up until this point, recent discourse in UK politics has taken for granted that the state has a right – even a responsibility – to take taxes in order to provide services. The only debate has been around how much the state should provide; and the answer has been that it should provide more and more. The...

Only 7% of Conservatives support a policy of reducing both taxes and government spending. What makes this even more surprising is that among all voters this number lies at 6%. Likewise, compared to a national 52% who support increasing both taxes and spending, 46% of Conservatives would do the same. That is the crux of the dilemma: “modern conservatism” – that vote winning behemoth ushered in by Boris in 2019 – has made the Conservative Party as economically left of centre as the rest of the country. The current political lay of the land is that the majority lean to the left economically. Redistribution, higher taxes, and a bigger state are the status quo. This leaves the Conservatives with three options. 1.        Embrace the situation. A la Boris, they could embrace, even celebrate, this new reality and build around it. Previously un-Conservative policies such as enlarging the already large state, throwing more money at the NHS without attempting a...