The doors of the Metro stations in Moscow are lethal-thick, heavy glass with a wicked swing. Yet surprisingly few people hold them open for the passenger behind them. Russia's capital is a tough, atomised, distrustful city: communism, supposed to inculcate brotherly love and self-abnegation, instead bequeathed something like the opposite. The same could be said of some other grand political ideas (militant trade unionism, for example): over-ambitious, impractical and naive, they ultimately backfire. Something similar may be true of a central tenet of New Labour-that public services should consume an ever-increasing share of national wealth. For more than a decade, espousing that view seemed to be required of any party that wanted to win a general election. That public spending must grow eternally appeared to have become a political orthodoxy. No longer.
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