Do you think that anybody actually understands everything in the spending review? I know that I don’t – I’ve seen the headline figures and I’ve seen the sums, but that doesn’t really equate to understanding it.

So all the people who are either praising it, knocking it for being too weak or claiming the world will end because it’s gone too far – are they a) much better informed that I am, b) much smarter than I am, c) reading much more into it than I am, or d) blinkered by their own ideology and responding to that.

I’m willing to go with some of (a), a bit of (b) and shitloads of (d).

For the record, my ideology is that government should obviously be smaller and people should be more free to do what they would with their own money. And my preferred way to get to that ideal is not to have started from here. Given that we have started from here, with huge deficits, hundreds of thousands more people working for the state than need to and entrenched dependency on welfare, I have no idea if my ideal is attainable. Whether this Review will make things better or worse, I don’t know.