Britain’s economic pain started long before the recession

The Tories have had a tax problem for quite some time. But news of a recession at the end of last year has made matters much worse.

It has been an uncomfortable position, for Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, to defend the Conservative party taking the tax burden to a post-war high. The political defence has been that it was necessary to prove to markets that the UK took the state of its finances seriously, and that cutting tax was only an option when inflation meaningfully slowed down.

Reasonable points – but there’s a catch. Now, in the light of a recession, Hunt is insisting the remedy is tax cuts: ‘I do believe’ he told Sky News, ‘that if you look around the world, that the economies like the United States and Canada which have lighter taxes, particularly lighter taxes on business, tend to grow faster.’ The follow-up question, however, is always going to be: who fostered the UK’s high-tax culture in the first place?