AVALIAÇÃO CONTÍNUA: Alexander Boris de Pfeffel faz Margaret Hilda Thatcher dar voltas na tumba

Secção Entradas de leão e saídas de sendeiro 

Até agora, as políticas públicas do governo conservador não têm muito de conservador, incluindo a política fiscal de Rishi Sunak que está em linha com o big state na versão Boris Johnson. Citando a Autumn Budget and Spending Review no passado dia 28 por Paul Johnson do Instituto for Fiscal Studies, uma entidade independente de pesquisa:

«Fiscally speaking this year will go down as a once in a decade event. It’ll be up there with 1979 when Geoffrey Howe cut direct taxes, increased VAT and set out a new monetarist agenda, with 1993 the year of the huge Lamont and Clarke tax increases, and the start of a parliament of retrenchment, 2002 when Gordon Brown showed his real intentions to increase public spending substantially financed by tax rises, and 2010, when George Osborne set the stage for a long period of austerity.

To that list we can now add 2021. This is the year when a Conservative chancellor raised taxes by £40 billion or so; when the tax burden was put firmly on a path to exceed 36% of national income and hence settle at a record sustained level, a full 2.7 per cent of GDP higher than it was in 2019-20; and when public spending was increased across the board to take the size of the state back to levels not seen in normal times since the days of Geoffrey Howe.

It is important to be clear. This is almost entirely a set of policy choices unrelated to the pandemic. What we have had is a chancellor responding to the ever-increasing demands of the healthcare system on the one hand, and the increasingly dire plight of the likes of the justice, social care and prison systems, starved of funding for a decade, on the other. He has also presided over big increases in capital spending that were put in place by his predecessor.»

Na continuação da avaliação em Abril, BoJo e o chanceler Rishi Sunak levam quatro chateaubriands por imaginarem que os aumentos da despesa pública para sustentar o peso crescente do Estado vão ter consequências diferentes das habituais.