This is limiting the amount that can be raised from companies and from duties on drink and tobacco. But as they have accumulated, the stealth taxes have become more burdensome and the electorate has been trained to watch for them. Much of the pension fund deficit can be attributed to the drain, year after year, from that little-noticed change.The other problem is international tax competition. But more surprisingly we are not particularly low by European standards: higher than Germany and Spain but lower than Italy and France and, of course, Sweden.A word of caution: those German figures look too low and there may be compulsory charges that are not shown. Nevertheless, the fundamental point is that the UK is, in tax terms, middle of the pack. We may have a tax advantage over much of the Continent but not against our competitors in the wider world.The record of Mr Brown is therefore rather a puzzle.

We are clearly a higher-tax country than the US or Japan and higher now than Ireland and Australia. Not many people would believe that; in fact I didn't until I dug out the old Budget figures from the Treasury website.True, tax is projected by Mr Brown to rise to 38.5 per cent of GDP by the end of this decade. That would indeed be a huge increase - higher than at any stage during his tenure to date. But if you look at what he has done, rather than what he says he will do in the future, he has not been a high-tax Chancellor.How do we compare internationally? The right-hand graph comes from the latest "OECD Factbook", though the figures refer back to 2001. He increased this in his first Budget by a little under one percentage point and the tax take rose further in 2000-01 and 2001-02. But since then it has fallen and in 2003-04, the last year for which there are complete figures, tax was 35.6 per cent of GDP.

That is actually lower than it was in the last year of the Tories (see the left-hand graph). For the fact is that the proportion of national income taken in taxes and social security payments has hardly risen in the past eight years.Net taxes and social security contributions in the fiscal year 1996-97 - the year before he took over - were 35.8 per cent of GDP. This was: "The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing."Mr Brown has managed to generate a huge amount of hissing, without plucking many more feathers. If this charge is correct, there are serious implications for tax and spending in the life of the next parliament, whoever wins the election.So our Chancellor seems to have managed exactly the opposite outcome to that advocated by his famous French counterpart, Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619-83), finance minister to Louis XIV.