It wasn’t so long ago that the Conservatives won a landslide on Boris Johnson’s pledge not to put up income tax, national insurance or VAT. But four years on, and after 13 years in office, it seems the Tories have lost their hard-won reputation for low taxes. Mr S has done some polling and last week’s Budget only served to harden the increasingly common view of the Tories as a party of high taxers.
A whopping 50 per cent of voters now associate the Tories with raising taxes, up from 42 per cent who thought so a week prior to the Budget. More than a third of voters – 38 per cent – associate ‘advocating for lower taxes’ with the Labour party (shock!) while just a fifth – 20 per cent – associate it with the Conservative party. Just 12 per cent of 1,500 voters think that their individual taxes will decrease following the Budget, compared to twice that (23 per cent) who expect them to increase.
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