Yet [Mark] Britnell [influential NHS manager and privatization advocate] had topped his own ‘no mercy’ line in an article he’d written for the same magazine the previous week. There he made the unremarkable if contentious point that ‘all over the world, the size of the state has been increasing.’ What furrowed the brow was the base year he chose for the comparison with today’s level of public spending: the year was 1870, when infant mortality in Britain ran at 16 per cent, working-class men had just been given the vote, and four years had passed since a cholera epidemic killed 3500 Londoners.”