Britons Are Ready for Smaller Government

Oddly, in all the tumultuous economic events of the past week, no one seems to have noticed that the public’s attitude to taxation has been utterly transformed. Perhaps it escaped you in all the excitement about a recession of historic proportions, and the argy-bargy over George Osborne’s competence, but something quite big has happened here, which has a bearing on both the future of the economy and of Mr Osborne. The quasi-official pronouncement (delivered by a hapless David Gauke, but it might have been – but for the grace of God – any one of half a dozen others), that it is every citizen’s duty to shop his window cleaner/gardener/handyman to the taxman, triggered a landslide of opprobrium and ridicule.