Last week’s budget hit the headlines for apparently proposing government spending cuts of £110bn over the next five years. In fact, these are just cuts in projected increases: Sir Humphrey’s definition of a cut in spending is not the same as the definition most households and businesses would use. Total Government spending will rise more or less in line with inflation, though certain departments might face deep cuts, especially if welfare spending outpaces inflation.

We currently have unprecedented levels of peacetime Government spending – the Government will spend 54p in every pound you earn this year. Quite contrary to the suggestion in Archbishop Vincent Nichols’s recent Sunday Telegraph article, the emergency Budget did not address the consequences of the crash; it addressed rapid and unsustainable structural growth in Government spending. As a proportion of national income, the British Government is spending about half as much again as, say, the Australian government. Something, somewhere, is wrong.