Perception

Gordon Brown, said on leaving, “I tried to make the country fairer.”
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Reality

At over 50% of national income, the public sector in the U.K. is now as big as in Scandinavia, higher than in Germany, and up from the roughly 40% it accounted for when Margaret Thatcher left power to the early years of Tony Blair’s Labour government.

The scale of Britain’s spending crisis is vast on either side of the ledger: Public spending has risen above 50% of gross domestic product in the last two years, while revenues have fallen below 40%, to their lowest level since the 1960s.
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