As the nation prepares to go to the polls, new research shows people are willing to prioritise some policy areas which they don’t think will benefit their own finances. The public strongly support investment in public services, even if it means they are taxed more. Twice as many people believe spending on public services should be increased even if it means tax rises for households like theirs (56%), than agreed that taxes should be reduced for households like theirs, even if it meant less spending on public services (24%).
Well, yeah. But someone has then asked the interesting question – how much?
We polled people who said they were personally willing to pay more tax, and asked them how much.
Very few people were willing to pay more than £100. 1/3 weren’t willing to pay more than £10.
Note that’s the percentages of people who had already said they were willing to pay more tax.
Years back someone did a poll in the U.S. and a big %, maybe 80%, of the respondents said the gov’t should do more to fight CLIMATECHANGE!!! This got lots of attention on the news. Not so much discussion for the bit where they asked – “how much more are you willing to pay?” – the average was something like $5/month.
Mile wide and an inch deep.
Anyone can pay more tax anything they want to – maybe these researchers should go out equipped with one of those payment dongles with a link to the Treasury and everyone who agrees should be asked to donate on the spot?
The question should be framed fairly.
Would you be prepared to pay more tax if it meant an improvement in public services?
Depends which public services we’re talking about. Paying for enriching visitors arriving on beaches – no. Defence spending on active troops and their kit – yes.
Would you be prepared to pay more tax if it was used to pay inflated pension provision unaffordable in the private sector; or to hire highly paid DEI officers; or to fund pay increases for workers who had rejected independent pay recommendations, engaged in strike action and not provided public services at all for long periods; or to enable 4 day week working?
At the tone, fvck off. Beep!
Hilarious:
The Tory campaign is getting even weirder as polling day closes in. CCHQ have been sending letters to Conservative/Reform target voters in the guise of the recipients writing to themselves in 20 years’ time. The letter urges recipients, some of whom are former Tory members who have cancelled their memberships, not to vote for the Reform party. The two pager starts off:
“Yes, it’s me. Or it’s you, I should say. I’m writing to you from July 2044, twenty years on from the day you voted Reform. I wanted to let you know how it all turned out for you. And for me. Long story short, not well.”
The letter hammers home the supermajority line: “I’ve been living with a Labour supermajority for the last two decades…You wanted to give the Tories a kicking, and I wasn’t alone…But I didn’t want to see them almost wiped out for good.” Not particularly optimistic for the 2029 election…
The letter from the voter’s future self finishes strong: “I made the wrong choice…I’ve got a really strong feeling i’m going to thank you for it twenty years from now…” The clearest indication yet that Reform has the Tories running scared…
Ha ha.
Spud’s had a paddy about Dan Neidle.
“I do not trust his methodology.
He has never been a friend of tax justice.
And like most so-called tax experts, he is clueless about the role of tax in society or the economy at large. That may be generous.”
I don’t want to see them almost wiped out for good either.
Almost isn’t nearly enough, I want to see them totally wiped out.
Steve,
“The clearest indication yet that Reform has the Tories running scared…”
Yeah, but they don’t want to do anything about it, they’ve never wanted to do anything about it.
After 2010, after 2016, they could have reflected on the results and realised that maybe chasing Guardian readers was not a winning strategy and gone a bit more gammon. If they’d made significant cuts to immigration, lowered the tax burden, done some reforming of the state, Reform would not exist. Farage is back because they failed.
And most voters are smart enough to understand the system and to know what that means. I know that it means I get a Labour MP this time. But the difference between her and the wet Europhile barrister I’ve got right now is close to fuck all anyway.
Even if you agreed with paying more tax to the government to fight AGW, why would you? We can spend the same amount of money better ourselves – buy some bicycle gear, rough up an abandoned road, find the home address of a councillor who voted for the emergency and steal their paving and flag stones.
Or best of all – steal Dale Vince’s artificial grass.
BraveFart
My favourite whinge is our habit of paying foreigners to attack us.
I’m thinking of the huge quantities of money being lavished on Yemen to allow the Houthis to bombard our ships. The taxes we pay on our ‘charity’ towards the 20 million or so local dole bludgers is crucial in keeping the Houthis going.
I naturally feel that, if the Middle Easterners or the rest of Global South wish to keep the Houthis attacking us, the dosh should come out of their taxes. Not ours.
What I don’t get is how much time and effort the Left generally, and their fellow travellers like the BBC, spend in their hatred of Farage and Reform. Surely, if they thought Reform was (only) going to destroy the Tories, you’d think they would be on his side.
@Witchie
I think it’s a case of they can’t help themselves.
Or there is another explanation. That a Tory opposition is a fairly harmless opposition. They’re even fairly harmless in government, from their point of view. The last thing they want is opposition with teeth & claws. That later could form a government.
BiW – here’s hoping!
WB – The Tories sending people fake letters from the future is genius. I wonder when they’ll start sending letters from dead relatives urging people to vote for the Con.
After 2010, after 2016, they could have reflected on the results and realised that maybe chasing Guardian readers was not a winning strategy
It confused me for years, but it’s now obvious that our politicians aren’t actually chasing votes.
Sure, they’d like your vote, but that’s not as important as doing what their bosses instruct them to do. They can and will and have burned their own party to the ground, just to stop gammons from gaining any sort of relief from replacement migration, the Big Gay State, and Net Zero.
Westminster is enemy territory because the establishment parties are wholly owned subsidiaries of Davos. They wouldn’t piss on us if we were on fire.
Tories normally do much better in elections than the polls predict. Rishi’s nightmare scenario is those hidden Conservative voters will surface and vote Reform.
@JuliaM, that has already been tried
https://order-order.com/2018/07/24/do-corbyns-core-voters-really-want-to-pay-more-tax/
@Andrew C, yes Murphy’s spats with Dan Neidle are very amusing. The Great Tax Campaigner didn’t say a word about Neidle’s exposure of Zahawi, as he doesn’t have the tax technical knowledge or forensic skills to do that sort of work. But what really gets him about Neidle is this: https://taxpolicy.org.uk/about/ – Neidle asks his supporters to give to charity, Murphy asks his supporters to give to him while simultaneously screwing charities for every penny he can get!
Tories normally do much better in elections than the polls predict.
This is true – people like to express high-status opinions in public, and supporting Tories (or, worse, Reform!) is definitely low-status. So they tell pollsters that they’ll vote Labour or LibDem, but in the privacy of the polling booth take another course of action. All the major public opinion players know this, and they all have their own ‘secret sauce’ to kludge the numbers, based on their past experience, which may (or may not) be fairly accurate.
When it came to Brexit, there was very little past experience to draw upon, which is why the pollsters mostly got their forecasts of the referendum result wrong.
I’d like to see them wiped out for good, and have to commit hara kiri to boot.
The tax increase people want is one that targets other people. That’s why taxing billionaires is very popular because there aren’t that many of them.
Only another 24 hours, Wat, and I can do my bit to ensure that!
Here’s the poll on how much extra tax people would pay to fund our glorious NHS:
https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/03/17/tax_and_nhs_spending/
In summary – of those willing to pay more tax (which is of itself only about 40% of the electorate):
– 30% would pay up to £10 a year extra;
– another 50% would pay up to £100 per year extra
– less than 20% (perhaps 7% of the electorate) would pay £500 a year or more
Yes, that really is per year.