Except the 26% tax rate wasn't the only tax
Breakdown of 'fully funded' manifesto pressure on Boris Johnson to do the same – after experts warned his spending splurge will require higher taxes
www.independent.co.uk
Increasing total taxation revenue by £80 billion amounts to 4% GDP. To put that in perspective, the government currently pulls in 37% GDP in revenue through taxation. Going up to 41% GDP would still only leave the UK around the middle of European countries, below Italy, France, Belgium, Austria, etc.
As for the publicly owned utilities, they weren't doing well before in many cases and were being run inefficiently and not actually making money but costing more money to keep running.
Not without some truth. However, in order to sell them off, the government reformed them to make them profitable, otherwise the private sector would be unwilling to shell out for them. So the government always could have run them efficiently and profitably had it wanted.
Secondly, as the joke goes, the UK was the only country to privatise its utilities and have them still owned by the state - albeit the states of Germany and France. Because the utilities were sold off to European utility companies whose governments still in large part owned them. And there we see another way we could have run our utilities efficiently and for profit. But it's not the British - well, Conservative Party - way. For all the pragmatic talk, the Tories have been intensely ideological and in thrall to the finance sector ever since Thatcher, and there is no problem they think cannot be solved by privatisation, deregulation and lower taxes.