Labour's spending plans aren't especially unusual – just look at Sweden | Larry Elliott

The US favours small government and low taxes, but many developed countries thrive on the opposite

Labour's plans for Britain involve a big increase in the size of the state. Government spending as a share of national output would rise to 45%. And apart from brief spikes in the mid-1970s and during the more recent financial crash, it has not reached those levels since the second world war.

To which the mature response should be: so what? A glance around the world shows that there are rich developed countries where the state is relatively small and there are rich developed countries where the state is large. In democracies, voters get the right to choose between the competing models.