Aditya Chakrabortty tells us, in The Guardian, that the state has been permanently hollowed out by the rigours of austerity:

The basic message of today – the most significant in British policymaking this parliament, setting out the shape of the state and budgets for Whitehall departments for years to come – is that the Tories have now called off their decade-long austerity programme, but they will never reverse it. Beyond the NHS, huge swaths of the public realm are now permanently shrunken.

On the same day The Times tells us that:

Rishi Sunak claimed that the Conservatives are the “real party of public services” as he announced a budget yesterday in which government spending will rise to its highest sustained level since before Margaret Thatcher.

And:

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) said that the overall tax burden would be at its highest level since Clement Attlee’s postwar Labour government of 1945-51 and spending at its highest level since the 1970s.

One of those two claims about the size of the state must be wrong. It being that of Mr. Chakrabortty which is so, of course. There has been some movement around of how much is spent upon which thing, that’s true, but then that’s a necessary process even within a rising budget in order to avoid running out of other peoples’ money.