I think that government spending as a % of GDP needs to come down globally…

No no, it is an excellent question.

The Standard used government spending from the Treasury accounts and GDP from the national accounts to get their ratio. I used (general – so central and local) government consumption and investment from the national accounts and GDP from the national accounts – just for the fact that they should provide more comparable series. However, the issue with the series I’m using is where you place the investment – since investment provides a “stream” of benefits, but the cost is only counted in a single period.

If we think that Labour did a one off increase in investment which replaces future investment, then the ratio increasing seems justifiable.

Now their series may be more smooth if they were using/extrapolating from annual figures (i’m not really sure tbh). Furthermore, I am unsure about whether their figures were either nominal on nominal or real on real or even nominal on real – it can be hard to compare figures from different series in the way they have.

Also, I expect that there may be an issue of where exactly some transfer income comes in – which would lead to my figures understating the size of central govt methinks