BRASS TAX

Boris Johnson’s £12bn tax hike to pay for social care has outflanked Labour and confounded his own Conservative party. But with public spending at its highest level in peacetime, will it solve a dilemma that has defeated his predecessors – and even if it does, will the Tories ever forgive him?

- Toby Helm and Phillip Inman

BORIS JOHNSON appeared, on the surface at least, super-confident as parliament returned last week to tackle the vast backlog of challenges that Covid-19 has left piled high in ministerial in-trays across Whitehall.

On a visit to a care home in east London, the prime minister cheerfully clasped a mug saying Love Social Care before heading to the House of Commons to make a statement on how he proposed to fund the health and care systems out of the crises in which both are mired. But his characteristic ebullience hid a new determination in government, a new calculation.

The aim was to showcase a prime minister determined to govern, lead and finally tackle head-on the issue that his predecessors David Cameron and Theresa May, and Labour prime ministers before them, had ducked or messed up over previous decades. Politically that was one intended message, the other being that Keir Starmer and Labour still had no plan at all.

“This is Boris saying: I can make myself unpopular to get things done, even if that means breaking promises. The intention is to contrast strength and bravery versus weakness and dithering,” said a former Tory minister.

In advance, and after much prebriefing, the idea of a manifestobusting 1.25 percentage point rise in national insurance (NI) for every worker, to pay for a £12bn ($16.6bn) a-year health and care levy – one that would take public spending to its highest level in peacetime and mean a huge expansion of the size of the state – met with much dismay among the many Conservatives committed to low taxes and smaller government.