SO British public spending has been slashed, right? Well not if you look at the data. The key tables are psf3a and psf3b-2. But let me break it down for you. Total government expenditure in the first five months of the current financial year was £264.2 billion; in the first five months of the 2011-12 year, it was £256 billion. Is it down to higher interest payments? No, if you exclude those, spending has risen from £235.3 billion to £244 billion. Is it down to higher benefit payments, such as unemployment? No, if you exclude those as well as interest payments, spending has risen from £160.6 billion to £164.5 billion.* (but see update below)

So where has the money gone? Look at the data for public sector employment and you will see it has definitely fallen. The headline number is down 628,000 from 6,292,000 to 5,664,000 between the second quarters of 2010 and 2012. but around a third of that (204,000) is down to the reclassification of further education employees, so those jobs haven't really disappeared at all. This morning, I was part of a panel discussion at the BBC; their economics editor, Stephanie Flanders, suggested the reason was that public sector workers were still being paid more, despite a pay freeze. Many are entitled to seniority benefits, with their wage increasing each year.

Whatever the reason, the key point is that all the progress in cutting the deficit so far has come from higher taxes and cuts in capital spending. In the year before this government came to office, tax revenues were £476 billion; last year, they were £532 billion. Net public sector investment has fallen from £51 billion to £22 billion. In terms of the fiscal multiplier, that imprecise measure, cutting capital spending is probably the worst thing you can do for the economy; clearly the same cut can't be achieved again.

Overall, in the first two years of the coalition, public spending (including capital investment) rose £14 billion, while taxes rose £56 billion, causing borrowing to fall by £42 billion. The programme was deliberately front-ended in terms of taxes, leaving the spending cuts to come later. But despite losing all those workers, public spending is still rising. It is incredibly difficult to cut real public spending. Margaret Thatcher has a fearsome reputation on this score but when she left office, real spending was 5% higher than when she started.

UPDATE: * Figures out for the month of September seem to have revised away some of this extra spending. Current spending between April and August, excluding interest and social benefits, was originally recorded as £164.5 billion (see above); now the ONS reckons it was £161.4 billion. (Three billion here or there, who's counting?) In the first six months of the year, that measure of spending has still risen, from £192.8 billion in 2011-2012 to £195.5 billion this year. Total current spending is up 2.1%, from £307.1 billion to £313.6 billion; i.e it's roughly flat in real terms. Ask the average Briton, however, and they will probably believe that the cuts have been much more swingeing than the numbers suggest.