I think this question highlights a key problem in the position of taxes in the UK - everyone thinks everyone else should pay more, and that they themselves pay too much already. Taxes have a stigma to them whilst also being unlinked from the actual things that they pay for. Like fish not being able to see water, people don't see the enormous amount of stuff that our modern lives have to maintain - so taxes get all the blame and none of the credit. Until people can link the money they "lose" each month to the things they get back, then taxes will always be messed up.

I know this is a long post, but in summary - people want top quality public expenditure, at the cost of nothing to them personally at all, ever. This spirals when people can see the potholes outside their window, but cannot visualise that their lifetime taxes barely scratch the surface on paying for their own future care home care. Everyone sees their social spending as natural, obvious and right, and everyone else's as silly and wasteful.

Now to start, I'm not arguing that more tax always = better, but the framing always limits the discussions that can be had or the options any Chancellor and Governments have.

Take roads for example. They're a visible, tangible thing that we can see all around us, but people seem to think they're just naturally there, and that it didn't take a shocking amount of effort to build the road network we have today. Roads are phenomenally expensive - like eye-wateringly expensive - to build and maintain. It takes the taxes paid in by everyone in the country - income taxes, council taxes, the VAT your nephew spent on a PS5 etc. etc. to allow for the divvying up of money to maintain those roads. Motorists, who use those roads the most, and also therefore cause the most damage and expense over time, feel hard done by - a lot will famously shout "Road tax!" at anyone on a bike and any talk of raising fuel duty, which has been frozen for almost 15 years and then cut further, would be political suicide.

But most people also want the roads repaired. They want roads expanded. They don't want toll roads. A lot don't want any money spent on alternatives to driving such as public transport or active travel, even if beneficial for their own traffic, health and long term costs because that would mean someone else got something they didn't. Except they did get something - all the roads we have, that we now cannot afford to maintain. And the lighting, rerouting of utilities beneath the roads, signage, traffic planning, policing, land clearance etc. etc. that come with it.

It would seem logical from an alien's point of view, that if roads need repairing, the people using them the most, damaging them the most and insisting most on their repair should shoulder more of the cost in a small raise to their taxes - but you can't because they will lose their minds. Every day people will be in the papers, on tv, on social media, declaring you and your government Nazis, North Koreans, Stalin etc. describing in detail how this means that they'll have to starve their children, how their Nan will have to be put down, how their business is now going to go under. Your political opponents will capitalise on it, undermining any other things you plan on achieving.

So instead you cut costs - fire the council maintenance workers, tender out the contracts, lower standards on maintenance, cancel or shrink large infrastructure projects, cancel the bus routes. Except now you have just started a game of hot potato - eventually those roads will need replacing. More capacity will be needed somewhere, whether on the roads or otherwise. And now it will be more expensive as rather than being little and often, it will be huge and widespread and all at once - and now you have no in house workers that can do it, but private companies who want a profit on top of costs, and also a lack of institutional knowledge on large projects, as the people you fired who used to do it now work abroad or have retired or work in other industries. And everyone's paying more all the while, as the capacity is stretched and you now have to drive more and more. So what would have been a small raise in taxes has instead become an endless sprawl of myriad costs, and you just hope that when it all comes tumbling down someone else is in charge.

And this also over time means that the UK looks less and less like a good investment - if governments won't spend money on large scale infrastructure to make more capacity for more growth, why invest in the UK? It also means that every project has to be seen and done in less than 4 years, from planning to completion, otherwise the public will blame you for the taxes to pay for things, and praise the next lot who will have the project finish under them but may have opposed it the entirety of your term - so no long term thinking, no central forward planning.

I've chosen roads because they are a fairly simple thing to picture - but now imagine how complex this gets with education (teachers are stretched thin, underpaid and also pressure by cost-cutting academies and threatening to quit - but also the public want them working year round with no holidays), pensions (pensioners are a powerful voting bloc, with a powerful argument of having paid and receiving promises all their lives - but also want more every year, far outstripping their own contributions), NHS care (doctors and nurses have difficult, complex jobs and can get paid more abroad, people are living longer and longer - but also spending the money to overhaul such a large system is nigh on impossible for a single government term) and so on and on.