Every now and then a politician says out loud what the whole machine is really thinking. This week we got exactly that. Buried in more than a thousand pages of leaked WhatsApp messages, Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden told Peter Mandelson that “every meeting I have is ‘who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others?’” It led the front pages of the Sun, the Times and the Telegraph. It should have led every conversation in the country.
Because that one line is the Labour government in a nutshell. Not how do we make Britain richer. Not how do we get people off welfare and into work. Just: who is left to tax, and how do we hand it to someone else?
The Mandelson Files
These messages didn't come out because Labour wanted them to. They came out because MPs voted to force their disclosure, after Mandelson was sacked as our ambassador to Washington in September over his emails about Jeffrey Epstein. The second tranche runs to over a thousand pages of private exchanges between Mandelson and senior ministers. This is the unguarded version of the people running the country.
And what does it reveal? A Cabinet consumed by its own survival and by the endless hunt for more revenue. McFadden himself warned that the welfare revolt could finish the Prime Minister: “Defeat, pull Bill or gut it all destroys his authority.” This is not a government with a plan. It is a government managing decline and squabbling over who pays for it.
Tax First, Think Later
The reason this matters to people in Preston East and across Lancashire is simple. When the people at the top genuinely believe the central question of government is who can we tax, you end up exactly where we are now. Frozen tax thresholds dragging ordinary workers into higher bands. Business taxed until it stops hiring. A welfare bill that grows faster than the economy that pays for it.
There is no version of national renewal that begins with the words “who can we tax.” Wealth has to be created before it can be taken. You cannot tax your way to growth, and a Cabinet that thinks otherwise will tax this country into the ground. The McFadden message isn't a gaffe. It's the honest admission of a governing philosophy that has run out of ideas.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK starts from the opposite question: how do we let people keep more of what they earn? Lift the income tax threshold so the lowest paid keep their money. Stop the stealth raid of frozen thresholds. Back the businesses that actually create jobs instead of treating them as a cash machine. And reform welfare so that work always pays more than worklessness, rather than simply taxing the workers to fund an ever-bigger bill.
The leaked messages did Britain a favour. They showed us, in the ministers' own words, that this government's instinct is always to reach into your pocket first. Remember that the next time they tell you they've run out of options. They haven't run out of options. They've run out of ideas.