Tax rises are no longer taboo in the UK. The party that grasps this could reap huge rewards | James Johnson
Voters are showing a new willingness to sacrifice more of their earnings to repair the damage done by the pandemic
For the first five years of the 2010s, the deficit seemed to be on everyone’s lips. A belief in the need to control spending carried the Conservatives through two general elections. But by the time I started conducting focus groups in 2016, the deficit or the debt were barely mentioned. So salient in the David Cameron years, it had all but disappeared from the public’s mind as attention turned to Brexit.
You would not know it from Westminster, but once more that picture is changing. Though the public were and are hugely supportive of Rishi Sunak’s furlough scheme, there was a ripple of concern detectable in focus groups at the time about the eventual need to “pay it back”. That has since developed into a firmer view, brought up unprompted, that though coronavirus support is needed for now, “we cannot keep borrowing for ever”, that the country will need to get on top of this debt, and an acknowledgment that there will be tough times ahead as we do so. This applies just as much in the “red wall” seats of the north of England and the Midlands as elsewhere.
