The popular view is wrong
In an excellent piece in the Telegraph, Lord Hannan shows how far popular opinion diverges from economic realty. Polls show that 65:11 percent want to keep the pensions triple lock, 71:16 want to keep any private provision out of the NHS. 49:30 are opposed to new towns, and 75:12 percent support a wealth tax.
Start with the triple lock on pensions. The core argument against it is generational inequity compounded by fiscal unsustainability. The triple lock guarantees pensions rise by whichever is highest: inflation, earnings, or 2.5%. This means pensioners are insulated from economic downturns that working-age people must absorb. The OBR and successive Chancellors have flagged that as the population ages, the cost becomes structurally unaffordable, consuming an ever-larger share of tax revenue raised disproportionately from younger, often poorer workers. The popularity of the lock is partly explained by the fact that older people vote in higher numbers, so the poll may reflect a democratic system biased toward its own beneficiaries. Economists broadly agree that a smoothed earnings link, without the ratchet effect, would be fairer and fiscally responsible without impoverishing pensioners.
Take keeping private provision out of the NHS. The opposition to private involvement conflates provision with funding. The NHS already extensively uses private providers. GP practices are mostly private partnerships, NHS dentistry is contracted privately, and independent sector treatment centres have been used for decades to cut waiting lists. The question is really whether additional private capacity can be commissioned on NHS terms, free at the point of use.
Countries with genuinely better health outcomes than the UK, including France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, all use mixed public-private provision models. The ideological insistence on purely public delivery has at times meant longer waiting lists rather than better care. The 71% opposition may rest on a false premise: that ‘private in the NHS’ means American-style insurance, when the evidence suggests it can mean faster access to the same free treatment.
Opposition to New Towns is perhaps the clearest case where popular opinion is demonstrably self-defeating. Britain has a severe housing shortage, with one of the most expensive housing-to-income ratios in the developed world. Opposition to new towns and new housing is a classic collective action problem. Majorities want affordable housing for their children, but local majorities also oppose the developments that would provide it.
The result is that the 49% opposing new towns are in many cases the same demographic whose children cannot afford to buy or rent. Historical evidence from the post-war new towns programme that built Stevenage, Milton Keynes, and Harlow, shows they successfully housed hundreds of thousands and are now thriving communities. Opposition tends to dissolve once towns are built; it is concentrated at the planning stage among existing property owners protecting asset values.
Among the key practical objections to a Wealth Tax is that much wealth, unlike income, is largely illiquid, in family businesses, farms, housing equity, pension pots. Annual taxation requires valuation, which is costly and gameable. France's ISF wealth tax was abolished by Macron after evidence it caused significant capital flight, reducing income tax and CGT revenues enough to partially offset the gains.
In a globally mobile capital environment, the very wealthy can and do relocate. The UK's nondom changes already prompted visible emigration among high-net-worth individuals, and a full wealth tax would intensify this.
The 75% support probably rests on the assumption that a wealth tax would raise enormous sums. In practice, revenues are consistently lower than projected because the tax base shrinks in response. The wealth tax in Norway cost their Treasury three times more than they had hoped to gain.
The common point across all four of these views is that popularity in polling reflects what people want for themselves individually, but not necessarily what produces good collective outcomes. The triple lock protects today's pensioners at tomorrow's expense. NHS purity protects an ideology at patients' expense. Anti-development sentiment protects property values at younger generations' expense. And wealth tax enthusiasm may underestimate how mobile capital is and how badly designed taxes can backfire. Public opinion is a vital democratic input, but it is not the same thing as sound policy analysis, and the job of serious politicians and think tanks is sometimes to explain why the popular answer is not the right one.
Madsen Pirie