Instead of saying farewell to Nick (30), we should be saying farewell to the triple lock

Farewell, Nick (30). The Treasury may not miss you personally, but it will soon miss taking your income tax. Britain has recently been losing young graduate after young graduate to Australia, Dubai, anywhere-but-here, and this week’s Budget has only ensured many more will be following. We have now reached an astonishing, dire status: 99 per cent of net British emigration is made up of people under 35.

This is not a blip. It is the inevitable consequence of having slowly but surely bedded in political worship of spending on things like the triple lock while taxing a young, working population into oblivion.

New ONS migration data, broken down by age band for the first time, paints the stark picture: 53 per cent of the net outflow are 16-24, 46 per cent are 25-34. Goodbye Nick (30) – the online meme character who represents the breakdown of the social contract for young professionals as the fiscal system seems structured against them.

Nick does everything asked of him: a sensible degree, a respectable job. He earns what should be a decent salary. Yet each month, as he studies his payslip, Nick questions: where has the money gone?

This Budget didn’t bother to hide the attack. His income tax is up. His student loan repayment up, too. His landlord, clobbered with new taxes, may be preparing to pass the bill on in higher rent. The Chancellor has even contrived to up taxes on the savings he drip-feeds each month. Driving might now face a 3p-per-mile tax. And when he finally escapes to the pub? Pints up. Tickets to raves up. Meals out up. All because hospitality continues to be battered with relentless taxation.

Meanwhile welfare spending was revised up by £16bn, covering a significant proportion of Rachel Reeves’ £26bn tax raid. A viral video of a bricklayer captured the mood perfectly: “Some days I want to give up but there is people on benefits depending on me.”

One of the most depressing realisations of all for Nick’s cohort, and it has been setting in for a while, is that they may never receive a state pension – but they are expected to happily pay for everyone else’s. The welfare bill is, give or take £10bn, about the same size as the income tax take. Kemi Badenoch’s “Benefits Street” Budget line in her response to the Chancellor hit the front pages because it reflected what people can see: ever-growing welfare expansions paid for by an ever-shrinking pool of young “working people”, as Reeves likes to call them.

And buried in the Budget papers was the line that millions face lower pensions after salary sacrifice has been capped at £2,000 a year for employee and employer contributions from 2029 – a generation unlikely ever to receive a state pension is now punished when it tries to positively save for one, mostly hitting private sector pension savers. Meanwhile, the freeze on the Plan 2 student loan repayment threshold means any graduate born after 1992 is doubly hit by Reeves’ budget choices. A young London graduate, earning well under £100,000 in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties, can face marginal tax rates of as much as 57 per cent.

No wonder Nick is off. As I argued here previously, Britain is producing a new cohort of reluctant emigration; young professionals who cannot see a path to progress at home. Which brings us to one of our culprits: the triple lock.

As Tom Tugendhat put it bluntly in the post-Budget debate:

“Let me be honest and lay it on the line. The demographics of this country are going against us… we do need to look at the triple lock. I know that those on my party’s Front Bench do not agree with me, but I have been clear that we simply cannot afford the level of welfare payments we are making… we need to be clear that health and pensions are now costing too much.”

And Sir Edward Leigh, even blunter:

“We all know that the triple lock is unsustainable… people of my generation are consuming an ever-greater proportion of national wealth… completely unfair on younger people if the burden of older people, through the triple lock, increases year by year… the triple lock must go.”

They are right, and this is is the political heresy Britain needs. Instead, we might now even be looking at the quadruple lock.

My colleague Henry Hill rightly asks: “Why is someone whose only income is the state pension any less deserving of an Income Tax bill than someone on the same income who’s earning it?”

What has Labour offered Nick? Higher taxes, a future without assets, and the privilege of subsidising triple-locked pensions. While Rachel Reeves still tries to blame the OBR productivity downgrade for her Budget tax rises, their pre-measures forecast knocked £6bn off the Chancellor’s headroom – and Reeves still raised taxes by £26bn. That was a choice, one that hurt those like Nick.

And for 14 years, the choice of the Tories has been to create, defend and fetishise the triple lock policy; symbolic of the system now driving young professional Britons away. As James Cowling of NextGen Tories has warned, the Conservative Party must now focus relentlessly on winning over these voters.

Yet even in opposition the Party seems to remain steadfast in its commitment to keeping the policy. With both policy renewal chief Neil O’Brien – who has been so forceful about the damage done to Nick (30) – and Tory leader Kemi Badenoch saying they are not going to touch it. Even if privately shadow cabinet ministers express to me the need for reform.

They need to grasp this reality. Those who don’t, as Cowling put it, should make way for fresher faces. If Britain wants to keep Nick (30), it must first say farewell to the triple lock.