The Tories know that the NHS timebomb means taxes must rise further still | Gaby Hinsliff

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

70% : On all the big economic questions - from taxes to climate change to the virtues of big state intervention during a pandemic - the right is losing the argument.
54% : Buried in the Office for Budget Responsibility's report this week was a warning that by 2024-25, spending on health, social care and pensioner welfare together - the unholy trinity of an ageing population - could be double what it was in the mid-1960s as a share of GDP.
52% : Labour MPs do when awkwardly trying to embrace Brexit.
51% : Now imagine where that leaves education, welfare or housing, fighting for the scraps left over.
47% : A staggering £84bn of the £111bn a year increase in day-to-day Whitehall spending between 2009-10 and 2024-2025 will have gone on health and social care, according to the Resolution Foundation thinktank.
45% : Yet the truth is that there is an ongoing structural imperative to tax and spend in coming decades that Westminster has long known was coming but seems to have forgotten, in all the drama of the last few years.
44% : There is broad cross-party consensus that taxes must rise, albeit fierce disagreement on who should pay them.
43% : Sunak may long to cut taxes, but it wouldn't be surprising if they had further to rise, as Paul Johnson of the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed out post-budget.

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