Cutting back the state

There’s plenty of reaction to the Tory tax plans in today’s papers (usefully summarised by Jonathan Isaby over at ConservativeHome), alongside some punchy articles on tax, debt and spending more generally.  Peter Oborne writes on the issues here, as does Simon Heffer here.  The Heffer article makes the following central point:

“When the economy is turning down, the imperative is to stimulate that demand. There is one obvious way of doing that, and that is to reduce spending on the unproductive sectors of the economy and transfer it, instead, to the productive sectors. There is only one sound means to do this. It is to cut back the size of the public sector and the role of the state, and to put at least some of the money saved into people’s pockets through immediate tax cuts.

Yet no party dare use the “C ” word in the context of the public sector.