The Tories are deluded if they still think cutting taxes is the way to win the next election

You can’t set a ‘fair’ plan for the NHS and education, offer wage rises to public sector workers, keep police officers on the streets and do other things they want to do, like fixing the ever-growing number of potholes in Britain’s roads, if you’re not willing to raise the money to pay for it

We cannot sustain our ageing population without raising taxes (Getty)

I like to keep an eye on what Robert Halfon has to say because while I think he’s wrong about a lot of things, he’s often wrong in an interesting way. He has ideas. Some of them are worth paying attention to.

As such it was disappointing to see the MP for Harlow falling prey to a tired old Tory trope in a recent piece he wrote for Conservative Home expressing optimism for the 2022 general election in the wake of the latest less than stellar local election results.

He wrote that they had “blazed a trail” for “fusing workers’ and metropolitan conservatism”. Crikey!

However, he went on to say: “At some point before 2022, in amongst all of this, the Conservative government is also going to have to get back to its DNA – cutting taxes.”

Oh dear.

You see, you can’t set a “fair” ten-year plan for the NHS and education, offer wage rises to public sector workers, keep police officers on the streets and do other things he wants to do, like fixing the ever-growing number of potholes in Britain’s roads, if you’re not willing to raise the money to pay for it.

That would be the case even were the country not facing the demographic time bomb of an ageing population. But, in common with much of the developed world, it is.

The Office for National Statistics’ overview of the UK population published last July makes that very clear.

In 1986, it said, only a handful of areas had more than 25 per cent of their local population aged 65 or over, mostly in southern regions of the UK. By 2036 more than half the local authorities in this country will be in that position. Just over 30 years ago none had more than 3 per cent aged over 85. In 2016 more than half did. In 2036 the vast majority will be at over 4 per cent.

It goes without saying that this will place a heavy burden on the budgets of the NHS, the creaking social care system, the pensions and benefits, and more besides.

The Nuffield Trust produced an analysis in November making a compelling case that an NHS grappling with deficit-laden trusts and crumbling buildings isn’t getting what it needs to cope with what the current population needs right now, let alone in the future projected by the ONS.

Meanwhile the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee this week produced a report calling for urgent action to prop up a social care system that teeters in “a precarious state”. It didn’t hold out much hope that a promised green paper from the Department of Health & Social Care will put it on an even keel.

Reports like these will only increase in frequency as the average age of Britain’s population continues to move up, and I’ve yet to get to the increasingly vexed issue of fairness to the younger generation who will have to pay for what that population needs.

Set against that backdrop, calling for tax cuts as Halfon does, as other Tories do, while still promising to look after the services the country needs, looks at the very least to be deeply cynical, if not downright dishonest.

That’s not to say that Labour shouldn’t come in for some criticism. It is true that it has recognised the need for extra revenue to fund its bold plans. But the Institute for Fiscal Studies found a substantial gap between what it expected to raise and what it planned to spend in the party’s last general election manifesto.

Of course there is the option of spending less on the NHS in future, and on some of the other budgets I’ve mentioned. Some right-wing think tanks are prepared to argue the case for that.

But no party would dare go into a general election with those sort of ideas in their manifesto.

The NHS being free at the point of need is something worth paying for, as the British public rightly recognises. And the NHS is actually pretty efficient at delivering healthcare when compared to, say, the system in the US, which spends more public money while achieving very much more mixed results.

But we need find ways to raise the necessary funds for it and for the other things our ageing population values, and is going to need.

Whether that’s through more wealth and property taxes, as the Resolution Foundation’s Intergenerational Fairness Commission called for earlier this week, or via some other means matters less than the willingness to have an honest conversation about what’s necessary.

We still haven’t really got started with that.