Boris Johnson breaks his promise and raises taxes to save public health

Boris Johnson is only true to himself and to his survival instincts, and the Conservative Party's hard-wing big mistake was believing that the prime minister they supported was playing by the same rules of the game as them. Against the electoral program -manifesto, in British political terminology- of 2019, which rejected any increase in taxes (both personal income tax, such as Companies, VAT or social contributions), Johnson announced this Tuesday an increase in the collection of more than 11,000 million euros a year, to be able to fix the deficiencies of a bankrupt national health service and a dilapidated dependency system. "Yes, I know and accept that with this decision I am breaking the promise expressed in our manifesto," said the prime minister in his appearance before the House of Commons."But no electoral program could foresee a global pandemic like the one we have suffered."

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Paradoxically, he is going to be a conservative politician, with a mental ideological hodgepodge that mixes libertarian instincts with

Thatcherist

orthodoxy

, the one who gets ahead of other European colleagues and does what the pandemic has made practically inevitable: raise taxes.

The moment and the way chosen to do it, however, and the justification for the measure, may make Johnson, to the despair of his critics, able to pull, without a scratch, the umpteenth rabbit from the hat.

The moment is right in the middle of an imminent government crisis, in which new ministers will come and go. Whoever moves will not be in the photo, so only a few conservatives have dared to publicly air their disagreement. The mode chosen is the least damaging to large incomes, even if it has irritated employers. It will be an addition of 1.5% to social contributions (

National Insurance

, or National Insurance, in British terminology). 60% will fall on the employer and 40% on the employee.

It is a tax on labor, when it is most needed to be created, which will affect even health workers whose working conditions are to be improved.

But the formula, used successfully for the same purpose by Labor Gordon Brown more than a decade ago, has popular backing and suggests a fair share of the burden.

It will begin to be applied in April 2022 and has been camouflaged with the name of the Health and Social Assistance Tax, so that its finalist nature camouflages what is a clear tax increase.

"The National Insurance was created to financially protect those who could no longer work, based on a contributory system to which employers and employees contributed," said Kitty Ussher, the chief economist of the main British employer, CBI.

"There is no logic that is used to finance something else."

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Five million on the waiting list

Johnson has felt the pressure of his Minister of Economy (and increasingly clear political rival), Rishi Sunak, who considered hardly sustainable a public debt that already accounted, last March, for 106% of GDP.

An extra channel of funding was necessary to rebuild the battered National Health Service (NHS), and also fulfill the promise of the Prime Minister to reform and strengthen the national dependency system (

Social Care

, or Social Care , which includes both residences and domestic care).

The waiting list, in England alone, for operations or even routine treatments, exceeds five million people. 90% of patients wait an average of 44 weeks. By tying the funding of two such complementary public services through a finalist tax, Johnson is committed to repairing a financial hole in the NHS that experts had estimated at more than € 17 billion (the new tax will raise about € 41 billion). euros), and consolidate a solid source of income to sustain the independence services.

The conservative government has also committed to significantly lower the level of income or wealth from which the elderly or the disabled will be able to obtain public attention. "Read my lips. Conservatives will never be able to boast of being the low-tax party anymore, ”Labor leader Keir Starmer said in the House of Commons. In this way he remembered that infamous promise of former US President George Bush ("Read my lips, no more taxes") that cost him reelection when he was forced to increase taxation.

Johnson has broken not one but two of his election promises.

It will raise taxes, and will play - albeit provisionally, for one year - the so-called "triple lock on pensions."

Under this rule, imposed in 2010 by the coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, pensions would rise each year by the same as the highest figure between inflation, the average wage level or a minimum of 2.5%.

The effects of the pandemic on the labor market last year caused the anomalous effect of the average wage level reaching 8%, and the British Government has already announced that it will not apply that figure for the next fiscal year.

The Government has also announced an increase, also of 1.25%, in the tax on dividends paid individually by citizens who own shares.

The prime minister has played with a double advantage: few citizens will question a distributed and disguised tax increase that will serve to repair the much appreciated national health service.

And few will consider that Johnson, again, has broken his own promises.

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