The Size of the British State
I was speaking with someone recently about the size and inefficiency of the British State. They were despairing about the NHS, a system so convoluted most would not believe the errors that go on a day-to-day basis.
They asked me: “How would you fix it?”
I thought of my experience in Finland. A country that just seemed to work; transport that was efficient, fast, and correctly sized — quaintly, a rush hour in Helsinki is everyone not getting a seat. This is an unfair comparison because Finland is a country of 5 million, about 10 times smaller than the UK. Of course their Government works; the population they have to provide services for is far smaller.
The British State is unimaginably large; the scale of modern Western democracies is so large that it is inconceivable. The median salary in the UK is £39,039. The British Government spends £40,000 a second. Every second, the median salary is spent by the state.
The British national debt, whilst not as large as the Americans’, is £3 trillion. When you begin talking in trillions, the scale is so large that one person cannot conceive it. For some perspective:
1 second is 1 second.
1 million seconds is 12 days (a holiday).
1 billion seconds is 30 years (a career).
1 trillion seconds is 30,000 years (longer than human civilisation).
3 trillion seconds is 90,000 years ago (the Sahara was a fertile plain).
The NHS directly employs 2 million people and over 6 million work in the public sector (including the NHS). The scale of Government operations is vast. Of the roughly £1.3 trillion spent every year, the NHS makes up £250 billion.
The scale of that number alone is unimaginable. There is often an outcry in the media about spending on what are considered frivolous projects in the millions. Some examples are below (including some fun additions):
Off the bat, the Burj Khalifa — the tallest building in the world — cost 6 days of NHS spending. The lavish state visit by President Trump in 2025: 40 minutes of NHS spend. The Sites Reservoir, a proposed reservoir in the US that would supply 1.8 million acre-feet of water — enough for 10% of the population of the UK: 6 days of NHS spending. The famed £100 million bat tunnel for HS2 was intended to protect 300 bats at a cost of £300,000 per bat. It seems DEFRA has calculated that one bat is worth 49 seconds of NHS spending. You get the idea.
It is so ridiculous you laugh rather than cry, but the state as it exists is convoluted, inefficient, and downright incompetent. The most painful part of it all is that all this waste is occurring not whilst the state is delivering spectacular services, but rather dreadful services. With homeless veterans on the street, crumbling schools, awful council housing, and a military incapable of fighting a war if one arose.
The state has to change; it has to reform.
All of this is disregarding the impending timebomb of demographics that will lay waste to every level of Government funding whilst taxes are at their highest since WW2.
There is no room for the state to be this inefficient. Yet how do you reform it? The system is gargantuan, to say the least. It is far too large for one person to take on and at every step there will be resistance to reform — because reform will mean that people will lose their jobs.
The British State and its organisations are more likely to chug along until something revolutionary happens. Whether that is someone on the left of politics taking power and ripping it all down, or someone on the right ironically doing the same, who knows?
But frankly, I think pigs will fly before that happens.