I might be slow on the uptake, but ...

... here's a summary of Tory and Labour spending plans before the last general election in 2005, as reported reasonably accurately in The Torygraph at the time:

Labour was forced on the defensive yesterday over its attempt to claim the Conservatives were committed to £35 billion of "cuts" in public services"... Tony Blair and Gordon Brown claimed the "cuts" were equivalent to sacking "every nurse, every teacher and every doctor"...

Mr Darling claimed that, according to the Tories own figures, they envisaged total public spending in 2011-12 would be £663.5 billion - £35 billion lower than Labour's expenditure plans. He said that Tories were committed to further spending commitments totalling at least £15 billion. As these would have to be funded by cuts elsewhere in spending plans, the total size of the Tories' "cuts" was £50 billion.

Mr Darling said savings on this scale could not be achieved by a cash freeze. A Tory government would have to cut departmental budgets. "Far from being able to fund such huge cuts in 'bureaucracy', £35 billion is actually the equivalent of sacking every teacher, every GP and every nurse in the country - sacking 550,000 teachers, 81,000 GPs and 396,000 nurses," Mr Darling said.

I didn't bother getting involved in politics until early 2006, having hitherto seen it as a spectator sport, but looking back, that was a mushroom cloud rather than a smoking gun.

Interestingly enough, Labour have more or less hit the spending target of £700 billion in 2011-12* that they proposed back in 2005. But what's really interesting is that if you turn Alistair Darling's logic round, what he was saying was that out of £700 billion planned spending, barely five per cent was to be on we traditionally see as 'public services', i.e. teachers, doctors, nurses**. To be fair, he didn't mention law and order, but that cost about as much again.

As a cuddly liberal, I don't have a problem with a bit of spending on measures to alleviate poverty, preferably in the form of a Citizen's Income scheme, which I reckon would cost rather less than total current spending on measures to alleviate poverty - be they good (such as the tax-free personal allowance or Child Benefit), totally counter-productive (like Working Tax Credits) or downright wasteful (like tax-breaks for pension contributions), call it £200 billion per annum, tops.

So my small-ish state would cost about £270 billion, but that still leaves £430 billion out of current spending of £700 billion unaccounted for.

So let's not bicker and argue about whether refuse collection (which costs about £4 billion a year, if memory serves) is or is not a core function of the state, can we not try and work out where the £430 billion goes?

* That is a brilliant website, well worth a visit.

** Yes, we'd do far better to replace this with health or education vouchers, but that would be in order to improve the quality of services offered, and not a cost-saving measure as such.