Tom Friedman ran a piece endorsing Tony Blair in the New York Times Friday. Well, Friedman has a right to his opinions – however misguided (Blair’s rule has been characterized by incompetence, bullying and dishonesty, and needs to come to a rapid conclusion) but, when it comes to the hard data, he ought to get a few facts right.

Let’s take some examples.

In the course of his article, Friedman writes about how Blair’s supposed improvements to the National Health Service (largely illusory to those luckless enough to be its patients) and other ‘reforms’ have been achieved with ‘few’ tax increases, something that will be news to the luckless British taxpayer.

Here, Tom, are a few numbers (via the London Times):

“Britain is not yet a decisively high-tax country, but it is on a path heading back that way. For most of the previous decade, tax as a percentage of national income hovered in a range between about 33 per cent and 37 per cent. By the start of this decade, however, the tax burden had climbed into the high thirties, as Gordon Brown increased taxes by a total of £26 billion to finance a rapid expansion of state spending. Today, the Chancellor’s projections envisage the Government’s revenues, as measured by current receipts, rising to 40.5 per cent by 2008, and remaining there to mark the highest tax burden for more than two decades. These figures, of course, do not take into account any post-election tax rises, which most independent economists believe will be needed to curb a large structural deficit in public spending.”

It’s worth noting that many of these tax increases have been by stealth, most notoriously the decision to abolish tax credits on dividends received by pension funds, a technical change that few Brits understood at the time, but which has now devastated the once healthy British pensions system.

Oh yes, Tom, as for all those jobs you were talking about, consider this:

“Since 1999-00 Britain’s public sector has been expanding rapidly. Overall public spending increased by 25.5 per cent in real terms between 1999-00 and 2004-05. It is planned to increase by 44 per cent between 1999-00 and 2009-10…one in four jobs are now in the public sector, with one in three women employed by the Government. Half of all new jobs created since 1997 have been in the public sector, a rate of increase twice that of the whole economy. In total, 861,231 additional public sector jobs were created between the summer of 1997 and the autumn of 2004, taking the total to 6,906,922.”

And on the government debt, Tom, Labour is now behaving with the sort of fiscal irresponsibility that we would expect from, oh, the GOP. According to S&P, the national debt is rising rapidly from 34 percent of GDP today to an estimated 150 percent by 2050. It’s worth noting that S&P’s numbers exclude an additional USD 100 billion of dodgy off-balance sheet financing (the Private Finance Initiatives) organized by Blair’s ‘deft’ (your words, not mine) Chancellor of the Exchequer, the vindictive, and more than a little loopy, class warrior, Gordon Brown.

Now it is true that the British economy has performed well since 1997, but with the exception of one genuinely good – and daring – reform (the decision to grant independence to the Bank of England), this has been despite Tony Blair’s government (which has added an enormous regulatory burden to industry), not because of it.

Throw him out.