‘Support for an increase in public spending rises.’ That’s the headline generated by the latest British Social Attitudes survey results, out today. They show that the proportion of the population saying that the government should ‘increase taxes and spend more’ rose from 31 per cent in 2010 to 36 per cent in 2011 — the first such rise since 2002. Meanwhile, the proportion backing tax and spending cuts fell from 9 per cent to 6 per cent.
Notably, the survey doesn’t give the option of reducing taxes and spending more (ruling out, for example, Ed Balls’ proposed combination of a VAT cut and increased infrastructure spending), nor of increasing taxes and spending less (as the coalition’s deficit reduction programme actually entails). And there are two other important caveats to that headline: support for increased spending is still a minority opinion (55 per cent want taxes and spending kept the same), and it remains well below where it was during Thatcher’s spending cuts in the 1980s and the last round of recession-induced cuts in the mid-90s.
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