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Comprehensive Spending Review

I will make my argument and then happily give way. By bringing down Government debt, we effectively saved the taxpayer around £3 billion in annual interest payments. We did fix the roof when the sun was shining. On Government spending, coalition Ministers like to pretend that Labour was the last of the big spenders, but in 2007 UK Government spending as a proportion of GDP was lower than that of France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, and our non-age-related social spending as a proportion of GDP was lower than the European Union average. Our education spending was almost identical to the OECD average of 5.7%. Our NHS spending in 2008 was 7.2% of GDP, compared with 8.2% in Germany and 8.1% in France. So much for the overspending myth, for myth it is.