A paradox. Elections can be decided by the amount of taxpayers’ money each political party believes should be spent by the state. Yet the total sum of taxpayers’ hard-earned cash going to each of the major government programmes, and particularly the largest — the welfare budget encompassing health, social care, social security, education, and housing — has long been unclear to most of the country.

Equally strange is how little attention has been given to what those programmes cost. As Andrew Forsey and I argue in our book Not for Patching, the government should set up a strategic welfare review to examine the outcomes taxpayers ought to expect from those sums.

Defence of the realm is the primary purpose of government. Even when the