The comment gets to the nub of the issue, which is that the cult of overspending - which reached its apogee under Gordon Brown - didn’t just leave the country close to bankruptcy, it also made the public services in measurable ways worse. Less efficient, less user-friendly, bossier. And it’s not hard to see why. With one person fully occupied, the work gets done. With two people semi-occupied, there’s ample scope for gossip, time-wasting, messing about on facebook and blaming the other person. So the work doesn’t get done. And then there’s the sense of entitlement that comes from being part of a huge drone class sustained by compulsory taxation. There’s safety in numbers.