Take a comment this week by ambitious Labour apparatchik James Purnell, frequently touted as a future party leader in the increasingly likely event of Gordon Brown getting the boot.

Despite the overwhelming thumbs down from the voters, Mr Purnell was unrepentant. The trouble, he argued in a speech to the Fabian Society, wasn't too much government interference, but too little.

"The state should help you more," he said. In other words, we need more state intervention, higher taxes, more civil servants and more central control.

For people like James Purnell – and the Labour Party is full of them – there is no defect in society that cannot be cured by government meddling. But isn't that what has got us into this mess in the first place?

Take, for example, health and education – two services that the public values most highly. For more than 10 years, doctors, nurses and teachers have been buried in a blizzard of paper from central government – endless quotas, targets and initiatives. often contradictory, confusing and doomed to be overtaken by a fresh directive issued a day or two later.

Politicians with absolutely no knowledge or experience of delivering public services – men like James Purnell – dictate to people at the sharp end how they should do their jobs. Instead of allowing the professionals to get on with their work, the Labour Government has attempted – with disastrous results – to micromanage every event in each classroom and hospital ward.

Only this week, Schools Minister Ed Balls was pontificating about parents' evenings. No wonder teachers are exasperated. Do we really need a government minister and an army of civil servants to tell us whether to hold parents' evenings? Isn't that something that can be easily sorted out between the school and parents, without any bossy directives from Whitehall?

The result of this government interference is that, despite public spending on an unprecedented scale, we've seen a catastrophic collapse in educational standards, filthy hospitals and pensioners pulling out their own teeth with pliers because they can't find an NHS dentist.

If anything, the tax and benefits system is even worse. While billions is wasted on feckless claimants, Brown has devised a system of mind-boggling complexity for the working poor – and thanks to Labour that includes most of us.

The tax credits system is a huge and expensive money recycling machine that sucks in enormous amounts of taxpayers' cash and then doles out a tiny amount in return. The rest goes on administration.

It is so complicated that no-one – least of all the Prime Minister and the pointy-heads in the Treasury – understand it.

I'm convinced Brown got into such a mess over the 10p tax band because he
had no idea just how many people
would be affected.

Objections to the sort of big government we've suffered over the last 11 years are threefold. Firstly, it is expensive. Labour has recruited more than 700,000 extra public sector workers – all on gold-plated pensions – since 1997, at a potentially ruinous cost to the public purse.

It would be cheaper, quicker and easier to reduce taxes and liberate the people to spend more of their own money on things they consider important.

Secondly, big government undermines self-reliance, independence, innovation and entrepreneurship. It is turning a rolled-up-sleeves nation of doers and tryers into an enervated group of listless inadequates pathetically waiting for the next government hand out.

Thirdly, and most fundamentally, it doesn't work. The dire state of our economy and our crumbling public services is evidence enough for that.