Belief in free markets is going out of fashion across Europe. Support for bigger government is growing. The change in fashion has seen low-tax parties, such as Ireland's Progressive Democrats, decline or die out - a big reason why taxes as a share of economic activity hit an all-time high across the EU 28 countries last year.

Centre-right parties, like Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats in Germany, are increasingly shying away from opening up protected markets, and privatisation has all but disappeared as an option for consideration and support.

Hard-right parties - from Sweden to Italy - view business with suspicion, and blame globalisation for every ill.

Strange though it might seem to say it after a big Conservative win in last week's UK election, but British politics is following the wider fashion.

While Boris Johnson won a bigger-than-predicted majority, the change in seat numbers at Westminster had less to do with the Conservatives winning more votes than it had to do with a fall in support for the Labour Party.

When compared to the 2017 election, the latter's national vote share fell by seven times more than the Tory vote rose.

Labour's slump, however, was not because the British electorate rejected its left-wing economics.

An opinion poll found that the main reason voters rejected Labour was Jeremy Corbyn. The leader was cited by 43pc of respondents as the reason they didn't vote for the Labour Party.

Just 12pc cited the party's economic policies, and that was despite the manifesto being the most left-wing since 1983, combined with the suspicion that, once in power, a Corbyn government would have moved even further to the left.

Now consider what the party of Margaret Thatcher promised. On tax, the Conservatives made no promises of cuts, merely a pledge not to increase them on personal incomes. During the campaign, an earlier commitment to cut corporation tax was binned.

Nor was there much sign of "rolling back the state", a once-cherished ambition of the Conservatives. On the contrary.

Two of the party's six big pledges could have also been in the Labour Party's manifesto - an additional 50 million free GP visits annually and "millions more invested every week in science, schools, apprenticeships and infrastructure".

Developments in the week since the election have added to the leftward momentum. Many of the more than 100 new Conservative MPs represent traditional Labour seats.

There has been much talk within the Conservatives that these votes were temporarily "lent" to them.

Keeping them will require the government spending taps to be opened, goes the new conventional wisdom.

Money will be pumped into infrastructure and education in areas that once hummed with industry but are now lagging behind Britain's economic engine - the south-east of England.

Such investment is necessary but not sufficient for economic transformation, as still-lagging regions in Italy and Germany show after decades of cash infusions. There are reasons to doubt that Boris Johnson's will won't be enough to narrow the north-south gap.

A much delayed effort to build a French-style, high-speed train line linking London and the north of England has shown that Britain has its fair share of problems when it comes to getting big infrastructure projects completed on time and on budget. Even if projects can be fast-tracked, a five-year term of free-spending government is unlikely to be generate a renaissance in post-industrial areas by the next election.

Education is probably even more important in driving economic development and helping under-performing regions do better. But if building out physical infrastructure takes time, building up the stock of human capital takes even longer. And it requires not just top-down government action, but a bottom-up change in how society sees educational attainment.

Britain, like almost everywhere in the world, has seen improvements in education over recent decades, but in formerly industrialised regions, such as the East Midlands and parts of Yorkshire, more than one in four adults has not completed secondary school, the highest share in the UK and double the share in some more affluent regions. That won't change much before the next election.

A matter of more pertinence in the short term is a growing fear across Europe that Britain after Brexit will pose a major competitive threat. EU leaders have been warning London that the only way it will get zero-tariff access to the single market after Brexit is if Britain commits to zero "social dumping" - jargon for undercutting taxes and regulations.

Against the backdrop of a shift away from small-state Conservativism, it is hard to see Britain out-competing Ireland and continental countries by under-cutting them on standards and taxes. "Singapore on Thames" is what some in Europe, and Ireland too, fear once Britain leaves the EU. The tiny, south-east Asian island has low taxes and business-friendly laws which have made it a magnet for investment in the region. But any suggestion that Britain could emulate Singapore is deserving of even more scepticism than the belief that Boris Johnson will turn around his country's depressed regions.

Singapore's tax and public spending levels are a fraction of those in the UK. There is no European-style welfare system and healthcare is mostly provided privately. As these are the most costly functions of government in Britain (and most other European countries), they would have to cut close to zero if the state in the UK were to be rolled back to the size of Singapore's.

Who believes that privatising the NHS and eliminating most welfare benefits are remotely politically possible in today's Britain?

Nor is anyone advocating the slashing of workers' rights, environmental standards and animal rights. Even in financial services, there is some scope for Britain to gain a competitive advantage by deregulating.

Howard Davies, the chairman of one of Britain's biggest banks, RBS, wrote recently: "The issue of financial regulation has not featured prominently in the general election debates… and we have seen no sign that the pendulum is swinging back toward deregulation, as it has begun to do in the US."

Britain will not sink into the North Sea when it leaves the EU. But nor will it easily or quickly offset the economic damage caused by Brexit. Many issues will bedevil EU-UK relations in the years to come. The emergence of Singapore in the North Atlantic is not one of them.

Irish Independent