If you think of Gordon Brown's public expenditure review this year, it's much more like a proper Labour public expenditure review than anything we've had in four years.

BBC: News Online

That in turn would cause tax revenues for their governments to continue to shrink, such that reducing public-sector deficits would become a never-ending labour of cutting expenditure and raising taxes.

BBC: Can Draghi do 'whatever it takes' to save euro?

Mr Brown argues that the causality worked the other way round: that New Labour created the benign circumstances which made the public expenditure possible.

ECONOMIST: Britain??s prime minister