Millennials are a growing electoral force, and their thinking on tax is a gamechanger

theguardian.com:

Taxes are the price paid for living in a civilised society.

That founding belief in the moral imperative to stump up for the public good lies deep in progressive bones, just as the belief that people should be able to keep more of their own hard-earned cash does for rightwingers. British liberals are so used to arguing that you can’t have lovely, Scandinavian-style public services on American-style taxes that most of us could probably do it in our sleep.

Meanwhile, even the embarrassment of being sacked over his own complex tax affairs seemingly hasn’t deterred the multimillionaire Tory MP Nadhim Zahawi from solemnly campaigning this week to scrap inheritance tax, on the grounds that taxing the unearned income of rich people’s children is supposedly a “spectre that haunts” us all. The battle lines on tax have been so firmly drawn for so long that this week’s report by the centre-right thinktank Onward on the political instincts of millennials – the late-20s-to-early-40s demographic poised to overtake baby boomers as the biggest electoral grouping – landed initially as something of a shock.

Unusually, this generation isn’t getting more rightwing as it ages, with only 21% willing to vote Tory at the next election. Yet Onward finds it is also more hostile than average to the idea of government redistributing income (as opposed to people keeping more of their own money) and it prioritises taxes over the social justice it is often thought to be devoted to. Something is going on under the bonnet here that neither Labour nor the Tories are properly addressing, and it’s about who genuinely gets a raw deal from the tax system. (Spoiler alert: it’s not Nadhim Zahawi.)

If millennial pips are squeaking, that’s because, compared with