James Crouch is head of policy and public affairs at Opinium.
Many Conservatives have been unhappy at the scale of tax and spending in the UK for years, and many even unhappier at the size of the state during their own time in office. But a major barrier to them cutting taxes and spending was public opinion. Simply put, slashing the state wasn’t where most of the British public were.
However, 16 months of Rachel Reeves as Chancellor appears to be changing that, and the appetite for greater taxes amongst ordinary voters is the lowest we have seen in recent polling.
For background, it should be emphasised how prepared the public was to accept a larger state and a reasonably high tax burden before the election. Now, that might seem like a strange way to start this piece, but we must remember the context in which this has taken place. The last Parliament was overshadowed by the pandemic and the huge scale of government spending and the debt it accrued, and the public tended to accept this.
Opinium have five years of data on the public’s attitudes to the levels of taxation and government spending. It is remarkable to think that in the run-up to the 2024 general election there was plurality support for “increasing taxes and spending more on public services”. Around the time of the 2024 Spring Statement, when Sunak’s government cut National Insurance for a second time — seen as part of a wider strategy to box Labour in on tax — 35 per cent supported greater government tax and spend, 28 per cent thought we should keep it as it is, and only 18 per cent thought we should be cutting tax and spend.
In fact, increasing tax and spend had plurality support in every poll where we asked it between October 2023 and May 2024. So it does have to be emphasised that in the run-up to the general election the public were prepared to accept that the British state needed additional revenue, providing it helped to improve public services. However, Rachel Reeves appears to have squandered the political and electoral space she had to raise taxes in line with public support.
The first turn of the ratchet was in her very first fiscal event. After the 2024 Budget the proportion of the public who wanted to actively cut spending and taxes climbed from 17 per cent to 22 per cent. This was the highest proportion supporting an actively smaller state since the Mini-Budget in 2022.
This being said, Rachel Reeves might have got away with this. While some became more aggressively lower tax and spend, the mid-ground of politics didn’t shift quite that far. Yes, the proportion who were comfortable with further tax hikes dropped, but the shift was back to keeping tax and spend as they are. For some people, it was a reset: it’s not great, but it’s probably what was needed.
It is only this autumn that the Chancellor has seemingly gone beyond the appetite of voters for ever-greater tax and spend. In Opinium’s latest poll, conducted between 5th and 7th November 2025, we have found that 26 per cent of the public now want to reduce tax and government spending. This might sound like a small number but it is the highest by a decent margin we have ever recorded across 36 polls since March 2021, and a five-point rise since August.
Similarly, only 19 per cent now believe that taxes need to rise to fund greater government spending.
Not only is that a commensurate five-point drop since August, it is also the lowest by a considerable margin we have seen in any poll. So the evidence points to a substantive shift away from higher tax and spend, reacting against the way the Chancellor has trailed her second Budget.
This puts Kemi Badenoch and Mel Stride in a reasonably good position.
The party conference worked as a way of getting across the argument that the Conservatives are the lower-tax alternative to the current Labour offering.
However, the Conservatives will need a lot more follow-up in the weeks and months after the Budget to hammer home any advantage from shifting attitudes amongst voters on tax and spend.
