In Soviet Russia Britain ...

... the state controls more of the economy than in Cold War era Hungary:

PARTS of the United Kingdom have become so heavily dependent on government spending that the private sector is generating less than a third of the regional economy, a new analysis has found.

The study of “Soviet Britain” has found the government’s share of output and expenditure has now surged to more than 60% in some areas of England and over 70% elsewhere.

But I'm sure that the enlightened NuLabor government is taking urgent action to address the imbalance.  Oh, wait:

“Labour has failed to encourage private sector investment across the country. Instead of supporting enterprise and small businesses, Gordon Brown has used the public sector to cover up his failures,” said Theresa May, the shadow work and pensions secretary.

You can almost map the economic well-being of the different regions by the portion that's government funded.

Across the whole of the UK, 49% of the economy will consist of state spending, while in Wales, the figure will be 71.6% – up from 59% in 2004-5. Nowhere in mainland Britain, however, comes close to Northern Ireland, where the state is responsible for 77.6% of spending, despite the supposed resurgence of the economy after the end of the Troubles.

Even in southern England, the government’s share of spending is growing relentlessly. In the southeast, it has gone up from 33% to 36% of the economy in four years.

Unfortunately, Captain Oblivious [Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman] is at the helm:

“In the long term we need to do something about it. This does suggest the crowding-out phenomenon of the private sector and it also suggests there is a lack of entrepreneurial activity.”

Don't see a linkage there, do ya, Scooter?  Of course, this would never happen here in the USA ...

Via Samizdata., who put things in perspective about our lapdog media:

By this evening, these stark truths will have disppeared down the memory-hole and, by tomorrow morning, everyone will be getting on the urgent business of finding a strategy for bringing all this rampant, wild-west, cowboy capitalism back under control.