Last November Jeremy Hunt announced what he proclaimed was ‘the biggest tax cut on work since the 1980s’. He cut employee National Insurance from 12 per cent to 10 per cent, yet to his great disappointment, the polls didn’t budge.

This week he decided to double down, lowering NI again, to 8 per cent. ‘The UK now has the lowest effective personal tax rate since 1975,’ he said. It’s likely the public will still be unimpressed, because taxes are rising further. Hunt’s policies will in fact leave the UK with the highest overall tax burden since 1948.

The headline rate may be falling, but the proportion of income subject to taxes has gone up, primarily because tax thresholds have been frozen. Four million additional low-paid workers will be liable for income tax, and another three million will be caught by the 40p rate. Many will find themselves paying the 45p rate.

The Chancellor is billing this as a £900 giveaway for the average worker, combining last year’s 2p cut with this year’s additional 2p cut. But in effect it’s a stealth tax. Workers keep less, not more, of what they earn. Anyone working 35 hours a week on the minimum wage will be only too aware of the facts. They will now pay 47 per cent more income tax than if the tax thresholds had kept pace with inflation. Why should they be grateful to the Chancellor for that? For the first time in modern British history, the average voter will be going to the polls with less disposable income than they had at the previous general election. This is not a formula for electoral success.

It is true that Hunt had little scope for cutting taxes, but the blame for that can be placed on high government spending. The lockdowns and the failure to restore the workforce to pre-pandemic levels have come at a high price. But major spending schemes – including the NHS Workforce Plan and the extension of ‘free’ childcare – are also to blame. This government has entirely failed to quell the surging claims for incapacity benefit, and a new welfare crisis has emerged as a result.

Even the ministers who like to talk about the merits of tax cuts have chosen the big-state Conservatism model instead. Liz Truss did no better. She talked a good game on tax cuts, but her notorious ‘mini Budget’ was a combination of borrow-and-spend policies. Asked to finance an energy ‘price cap’ that would cost even more than furlough, global markets rebelled. It was unfunded spending, not tax cuts, that led to her downfall.

The cumulative effect of all this is a Tory legacy of tax-and-spend greater than anything Labour managed in the Blair-Brown years. Rishi Sunak may think that the only option left is to talk up the extent to which his rate cuts will soften the blow of his stealth taxes. But to claim taxes are falling is to stretch the truth so far that it snaps.

As long as big-state Conservatism remains government policy, the economy will fail to grow. Britain will be weighed down by this tax burden and the most serious welfare situation in living memory.

In his Budget speech, Hunt said that Conservatives ‘notice that countries with lower taxes generally have higher growth’. That is also true at home. ‘We know that lower taxed economies have more energy, more dynamism and more innovation,’ he went on. ‘We know that is our future too.’ If only this were true. Britain is heading for an ever-rising tax burden and sluggish growth. Hunt is right to link the two. But the Conservatives now represent the problem rather than the solution.