THE big downward revisions to UK growth published just before Christmas must surely have been about as welcome to Chancellor George Osborne as first sight of Jacob Marley’s ghost was to Ebenezer Scrooge.

For the austerity Chancellor, the figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) should have provided a further reminder that the Conservatives’ long-term economic plan, contrary to what we were told ahead of the General Election and since, does not seem to be working.

Unlike Charles Dickens’s Scrooge, Mr Osborne looks unlikely to abandon austerity any time soon.

Rather, the Chancellor emphasised in his Autumn Statement that, while he might have had to delay his planned tax credit cuts in the wake of an embarrassing defeat in the House of Lords, he remained committed to a further £12 billion of cuts in annual welfare spending.

As we look ahead to what 2016 might bring, this commitment to austerity is likely to continue to weigh down the economy in Scotland and the UK as a whole, bearing down on aggregate demand. A bit like the exhausting weight of those money boxes for the late Jacob Marley.

The ONS figures show very clearly that the last thing Scotland or the UK as a whole needs right now is anything else to weigh it down.

As well as dealing with the fall-out from ill-judged UK economic policy, Scotland will also have to continue to face the consequences of weak crude prices for its key oil and gas sector.

Aberdeen has been hit hard by the oil and gas industry’s troubles, and Scottish Chambers of Commerce has been among those to highlight the broader impact of the sector’s woes on the overall economy north of the Border.

The most recent quarterly survey of the Scottish engineering sector underlined the knock-on impact of weak oil prices.

This survey, published by Scottish Engineering in early December, showed the sector had suffered sharp falls in order intake, output volumes, export business, and staffing in the latest quarter.

And Bryan Buchan, chief executive of Scottish Engineering, declared that the industry body’s last four quarterly surveys “have not made good reading”. He cited the key part played by the oil and gas sector downturn, as well as the impact of the strong pound and slower growth in China. The December 23 publication date of the ONS’s third-quarter national accounts figures meant that they did not perhaps receive as much attention as they merited.

However, the figures are very significant.

Not only do they make it plain that the UK economy grew at a rate well below its long-term average in the third quarter, the figures also now show that expansion was way adrift of the trend rate in the three months to June.

The revised figures for the second quarter are certainly at odds with the Conservatives’ claims, in the run-up to the General Election, that they were doing well on the economy.

Furthermore, the ONS data highlight the perilously unbalanced nature of the UK’s unimpressive economic recovery.

The ONS revised down quarter-on-quarter growth in UK gross domestic product in the three months to September to just 0.4 per cent.

The revised third-quarter growth is equivalent to an annualised pace of expansion of 1.6 per cent.

This is well adrift of a long-term average annual growth rate put at about 2.75 per cent by Bank of England Governor Mark Carney.

The ONS had estimated previously that the UK economy grew by 0.5 per cent in the third quarter.

And it has now revised down UK growth in the second quarter from 0.7 per cent to a below-trend 0.5 per cent.

With exports falling by 0.3 per cent in the third quarter, in the continuing absence of Mr Osborne’s vision of “a Britain carried aloft by the march of the makers”, net trade proved a major drag on UK growth in the three months to September.

It is also expected to have exerted a drag on growth over 2015 as a whole.

The UK has had to rely, to a far greater extent than is desirable, on spending by, in many cases, hard-pressed consumers.

There are plenty of signs that consumers’ morale has been boosted to some extent by the Conservatives’ high-risk strategy of stimulating the UK housing market, through measures put in place in plenty of time for the 2015 General Election.

And there is mounting evidence that an already highly-indebted household sector is relying way too heavily on borrowing to fuel spending.

This is happening at a time when the UK economy is so weak that the Bank of England is unable for now to follow the US Federal Reserve in raising benchmark interest rates. UK base rates have been at a record low of 0.5 per cent since March 2009.

Figures published by the British Bankers’ Association on Christmas Eve showed annual growth in UK consumer credit in November was the fastest since March 2007.

The BBA figures put annual growth in unsecured borrowing at 5.7 per cent in November. Credit card borrowing was up by 5.5 per cent. Other unsecured borrowing, comprising personal loans and overdrafts, grew at an annual pace of 5.9 per cent.

The dangers are there for everyone to see. Growth has been way below the long-term average, even before the latest wave of Mr Osborne’s austerity hits. Households, weighed down by grim economic conditions and until recently years of falling real wages, appear to be borrowing more heavily than is advisable to be able to spend.

All the while, demand in the economy is being supported to a very undesirable extent by a surging housing market. This surge has been aided by record low base rates. But base rates are at a record low only because the economy is not strong enough to enable them to be raised right now.

Mr Osborne may not see the ghost of economic cycles past. And he would seem unlikely to change his behaviour even if he did. But make no mistake: the spectre is looming large.