“Do you remember the Yes Minister TV series, watching Sir Humphrey take every opportunity to inflate his already vast number of civil servants? For this Government, it isn’t so much a comedy as a training video. Last year alone, the Government added 27,000 bureaucrats – equivalent to one quarter of the British Army.”

This is a quote from an article on the Conservative website and it is the central plank of Labour’s lies on the economy. They say that if the Conservatives spend less the quality of public services will go down. They also say that if you lower taxes government revenue will go down.

Unfortunately for the duped electorate, neither of these things are true. In countries with lower taxes and considerate governments, public spending can be increased by lowering taxes because lower taxes create a stronger economy. Gordon Brown’s much lauded non-boom and bust economy is actually better suited to Conservative management – lower taxes and better spending – than was the boom and bust economy (if, in fact it has gone at all).

In the debate last night David Davis took examples from around the world and, indeed, Europe that have benefited from visionary, radical and sensible spending and taxation policies.

But the argument about tax levels and the resulting scope for public spending must be had in isolation from the argument that must be made about the allocation of funds. In budget speeches made by Brown he lists the “representations” he has had to cut or increase spending and seeks applause and media attention for publicly refusing to comply with each representation. But if there is twice as much being spent on the NHS at point x, regardless of latency, why aren’t the services being provided twice as good? Why are they not even one and a half times as good?

The answer trotted out by politicians on all sides is that the services need reform. Reform is a useful term which can mean PFIs, reorganising the PCTs or, as in the current Government’s case, both these plus employing thousands of useless bureaucrats.

This year alone the government’s public services that have received so much extra funding have wasted £9m on art in hospitals; £20,000 on green ribbons that will apparently show "solidarity" with the local Muslim population in Nottinghamshire.

In February 2004 the (not-so) Independent newspaper said:

With polls suggesting voters think public services are in worse shape than when Labour came to power,
the Government will have to show it can make the current pot of money go further. The political imperative will be even greater as taxes increase over the next five years to meet Gordon Brown’s fiscal rules and pay for the rise in spending we have already seen.

We know, of course, that Gordon Brown has fiddled his ‘Golden Rule’ to avoid the Independent’s prediction but that’s not the worst of it. If crime continues to rise, hospital service and educational standards continue to fail and government projects continue to come in over budget the public will ask, in stronger and stronger terms, what the government is doing with the tax they are taking – the highest burden in a long time.

David Cameron got it right when he said that the tax burden on businesses must be reduced now and the increases in public service spending can be delivered from the inevitable increased proceeds as well as from the removal of waste. If the Conservatives, by the Independent’s own admission, were running the country more efficiently in 1997 on far lower taxes, there is no reason whatsoever to assume that it will not again at the next election.