You Can’t Live in a Smaller Country and Pay Fewer Bills

We are living through a national experiment in wanting consequences without causes. Large chunks of the electorate across Reform, Conservative and even Labour supporters want lower taxes, better services, rising living standards and economic sovereignty, while politely declining to pay for any of it. The sums do not care how sincerely this is believed.

Start with Covid. Furlough was not free money drifting down from the heavens. It was emergency borrowing on a colossal scale to stop the economy collapsing. It worked. Millions of jobs and businesses were saved. But the bill did not evaporate afterwards. It sits on the national balance sheet and is serviced every year. Anyone who took furlough already voted, in practice, for a big state when it mattered. Wanting libertarian tax cuts immediately afterwards is not principle. It is amnesia.

Then there is Brexit, the great act of economic self harm that nobody wants to own. It permanently reduced trade, investment and productivity, which means a smaller tax base forever. You cannot make the country poorer and then demand richer outcomes. Yet the same voters who backed Brexit now complain about high taxes and creaking services, as if these things arrived by accident rather than design.

The promise of tax cuts is the cruellest con. Any cut on offer would be small, but the costs it triggers would be large and permanent. Hollow out the NHS and you pay through insurance, dentistry and social care. Spook the markets and your mortgage rises faster than any tax saving. Let infrastructure rot and wages stagnate. The bill does not disappear. It just comes back monthly, with interest.

Scrapping net zero completes the circle of self sabotage. It locks in higher energy costs, scares off investment and strands British industry while the rest of the world decarbonises. Net zero is not a virtue signal. It is an industrial strategy. Abandon it and you cut off the branch the economy is sitting on, then act surprised when you hit the ground.

This is not a Reform problem, or a Tory problem, or even just a Labour voter problem. It is a cultural one. We have become addicted to crisis spending and hostile to paying for it, while insisting past decisions do not limit present choices. Politics can flatter that delusion for a while. Economics always collects. And when it does, the same people who demanded the fantasy will blame whoever was honest enough to count the cost.