The problem with modern Britain, said Liz Truss in a recent interview, is that it remains in thrall to social democratic ideas ushered in by New Labour in 1997 and which the Conservatives have not been bold enough in combatting or reversing. This will have been news to much of the public, particularly those who remember the long years of Conservative austerity after 2010 and the Tory party’s self‑expulsion of Britain from the European Union after 2016. Neither of these dominant events of the last 13 years was a flagship social democratic policy last time we looked.
Yet Ms Truss is almost right in one respect. The British public has been moving slowly and steadily in a more social democratic direction in recent years. The publication this week of the 40th annual British Social Attitudes survey provides some of the evidence. It reveals, for instance, that the public does not only want government to fund health care and pensions, it also wants it to reduce income differences between the rich and the poor. The public supports further increases in taxes and spending in order to fund public services too, in spite of the fact that taxes are already high by historic standards.
