All the talk of 'cuts' hides a real rise in Government spending

Christopher Booker,Telegraph
"The increasingly surreal state of our public finances was highlighted by several events last week, not least the Budget, which George Osborne claimed was intended to encourage growth in the economy while continuing to remedy the hole in our bank balance created by the last government’s reckless overspending. Despite the general impression that our new Government is cutting back on public spending – as Channel 4’s Jon Snow put it, we are facing the most severe cuts since World War Two – the Budget revealed that our spending will in fact increase even faster than we were told it would last October.

In the small print of last year’s spending review, Mr Osborne told us that annual spending was due to rise from £696 billion to £739 billion in four years’ time. In the small print of last week’s Budget, spending is projected to rise from £694 billion this year to £743.6 billion in 2014-15, an increase of some £50 billion. "