Please don't roll back the state like this

I think Will Hutton is right in this respect: "the Tories have a problem. The public now knows that markets fail. Without the injections of capital, liquidity and guarantees for both sides of the banks' balance sheets worth some £1.3 trillion, Britain would now be in the middle of a depression more shocking than the 1930s. To argue that government is the problem just a year after an event like that is intellectually bewildering."
Quite so. A level economics, folks. However, let's also be aware that while the Tories consitute the deep blue sea, a Labour government still theoretically committed to the ID card state and stoutly refusing to honour its manifesto commitments to electoral reform and trying to forget the recommendations of its own commission on electoral reform is perhaps the devil of the proverbial phrase. I'm not happy about either likely outcome of the general election next year. We need not to move into a laissez-faire economy but also we need to pull out of soft-orwellian state surveillance and into a system of government that encourages citizen engagement.
See the whole article: Sorry, David, if you roll back the state, you invite disaster | Will Hutton | Comment is free | The Observer: