HOW it chills the blood to hear an allegedly Conservative Prime Minister talk so casually about hiking taxes.

“There will be a need to raise some money from people,” Theresa May says of a plan to give the NHS an extra £20billion a year by 2023. “The key thing is that people want to know any money that goes in is going to be spent effectively.”

No, Theresa — the key thing is that your Tory Government is always so bloody generous with somebody else’s money.

A report by the TaxPayers’ Alliance confirms that the tax burden in this country is now at its highest for nearly 50 years.

The last time Brits were squeezed like this, Labour’s Harold Wilson was puffing his pipe on the steps of 10 Downing Street.

May’s plans to give the NHS a lovely 70th birthday present strike me as no different from Labour and their magic money tree.

Why stop at £20billion a year, Theresa? Why not £50billion? Or £100billion?

The Tories and Labour are both keen to show how compassionate they are, by giving away somebody else’s money.

And it is grotesque virtue signalling that does not give even a passing thought to the reality of the daily struggles of working families.

Doesn’t Theresa May get it? Doesn’t her old penny-pinching glumbucket of a Chancellor, Philip Hammond

Is this Tory Government really so clueless about the values it is meant to represent? The Tories are supposed to be the party for hard-working grafters, the party of working-class aspiration and the party of LOW taxation.

Here is the theory, Theresa — the more of your money the Government lets people keep, the harder they work and the more tax revenue increases.

That’s when the Government gets to spend the money as it sees fit — including pouring more money into the bottomless pit of the NHS.

But the more a Government taxes the people, the more it removes the incentive to graft.

What is the single greatest incentive to get people to work hard, earn more money, pay more taxes and enrich the Treasury?

It is HOME OWNERSHIP.

People yearn to own their own home. As Margaret Thatcher understood, nothing gives you a stake in society like owning your own home.

Maggie knew — in her lower-middle-class blood, in her shopkeeper’s daughter bones — that nothing compels you to work long hours like having a mortgage on a home you can call your own.

It is called working-class aspiration, and May and Hammond would not recognise it if Larry the 10 Downing Street cat dropped it on the welcome mat.

Thatcher opened the floodgates to home ownership like no Prime Minister before or since. But long before Maggie, anyone in this country could own their own home if they were willing to put in the hours. And I do mean anyone.

My dad was a greengrocer and my family so poor that for the first five years of my life we lived above the shop where my dad worked. But my old man had part-time jobs driving a lorry and working in a market and eventually he scraped together enough money for a deposit on the little house on the Billericay prairie, where I grew up and where my parents lived until they died.

My father would not be able to own his own home today, not even if he worked himself into an early grave. After eight years of clueless Tory government, home ownership is now an impossible dream.

For young couples starting a family, the property ladder will be forever beyond their reach, no matter how hard they graft. So tell me, Theresa — why the hell should that young couple ever vote Tory?

For all their endless blather about the housing crisis, May and her horribly out-of-touch Tories show no sign that they are truly aware the decline in home ownership is a national tragedy.

If May wants more money to throw at the NHS, why doesn’t she get it from our grotesquely bloated foreign aid budget?

This week it was revealed that UK foreign aid is currently funding 100 projects in China, the booming country that is on course to become the economic powerhouse of the 21st Century.

Some of these Chinese projects are in Africa, so that means the poor old British taxpayer is being obliged to fund Chinese projects in Africa. In what universe is that not insane?

Surely a truly Tory Prime Minister should be diverting the £14 billion wasted in foreign aid to our collapsing NHS?

Throwing the taxpayer’s money at loony development schemes is not generosity or compassion. It is not the sign of a humanitarian superpower.

It is the policy of a country that is stark-raving mad, a country that treats its hard-working taxpayers like a cashpoint machine that never runs dry.

It is the behaviour of the bankrupt man who insists on buying a drink for everyone in the pub.

And while this Tory Government squeezes British taxpayers like we haven’t been squeezed for half a century, a mammoth corporation like Starbucks gets away with murder, paying just £4.5million of tax on profits of £162million — an effective tax rate of around 2.8 per cent. A nice tax rate if you can get it.

Theresa May once worried people thought the Tories were the nasty party. Don’t fret, Theresa — these

days we don’t even think you are Tories.