The most alarming thing to me about George Osborne’s Spending Review yesterday was the figure given for direct job losses. It was 490,000; nearly half a million. There were also suggestions that indirect job losses in the private sector would match this in scale.

Nearly one million people extra out of work. Think about that for a minute.

Even if we take the smaller number that means, yes, half a million people not being paid by the government. But if there are no private sector jobs for them to move into (don’t forget the half million indirect job loses too, so there may be no slack there to be taken up) then they are going to be on the unemployment register – and being paid by the government.

Where exactly is the saving, then?

These newly unemployed people will also not be spending the amount of money they were when they were employed – if they spend any at all beyond food. This will inevitably affect private sector firms who will lose sales they might otherwise have had; thereby making the recession worse.

This savage cutting is surely a case of wearing a hair shirt for the sake of wearing a hair shirt. It is by no means inevitable.

I heard Mr Irresponsible saying that the Government didn’t want to make cuts; it had to make them. This is self evident nonsense. There was a choice to be made. And the cuts fall mainly on those on benefits; by definition those who can least bear them (and also those least to blame for the situation.) I don’t deny that some cuts are necessary but I dispute their rationale and decry their scale. Only lip service was paid to ensuring restitution from the real creators of the financial problem the Government has; the bankers. There was no black hole in the UK’s finances till their actions brought on the present situation, we had to bail them out, Government income plummeted due to the ensuing recession – and the bankers promptly carried on behaving exactly as before.

I thought one of the lessons of the 1930s depression was that you do not end one by cutting and cutting and cutting. You create employment by investing in infrastructure and the like. This injects money into the economy and the private sector starts to pick up.

Joseph Stiglitz says it better than I could.

And the dig at social housing was uncalled for. If there is a logjam in provision for social tenancies then the remedy is to build more houses for rent – at reasonable rental rates. (By the by, if local councils had been allowed to build more houses from the proceeds of Thatcher’s right-to-buy legislation there might not be a housing shortage now.) I noted too that they have already started to nibble at the BBC.

I well remember the Thatcher cuts and the devastation they wrought; from which many parts of the UK have still to recover.

This will be worse.

And it may not even get rid of the debt.