IT IS hard to avoid the view that a counsel of despair governs our polity and our public finances.

IT IS hard to avoid the view that a counsel of despair governs our polity and our public finances. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) says public spending cuts on a ??colossal?? scale will be required in years to come, but Chancellor George Osborne turns his ire instead on the BBC and attacks ??hyperbolic?? reporting.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) says we are only 40 per cent into the public spending cuts with the bulk yet to come, but Mr Osborne??s deputy, Danny Alexander, rebuffed the figures and said that in future (should his party have a future) they would balance the books differently.

Our political discourse is becoming stained with the blood of messengers shot. The IFS is scarcely a hostile witness to the Coalition??s efforts to balance the books of UK plc. And while critics of the OBR can point to its laughable record on past economic predictions, it simply won??t do for the Chief Secretary to the Treasury to dismiss its projections out of hand.

There is a whiff of panic and the pressure has not been applied by the Labour Party and Ed Balls, who has largely allowed himself to be painted into the same corner as Messrs Osborne and Alexander.

No, the pressure is being applied by the wider electorate, perhaps with an added nudge from devolved administrations, but from ordinary people who are saying they have had enough.

The first wave of austerity was about saving the banking system and our wider economy from collapse and there was a sense that everyone had to help bale out the boat. Then it became clear that the bankers themselves, blithely carrying on mis-selling, did not feel this national effort need involve them.

But now it is dawning on people that austerity has ceased to be a means to an end but has become a political end in itself, with the crisis being used to justify swingeing and permanent cuts in public services for which no party manifesto would ever have gained electoral support.

To be told by the IFS of all bodies that we are only £35 billion into a £90bn programme of cuts is an ass??s head moment for the ordinary voter. What are they taking us for?

For decades the orthodoxy has been that it was vital for Britain to become a highly-educated, fully skilled, high-wage country as the best way of surviving in a competitive world. Now we are asked to quietly accept that we are meant to become a low wage, zero hours economy, the banks to be rewarded with hoarded cash from quantitative easing, savers to be hung out to dry, and one or more likely two generations of our young citizens told to expect a worse life than their parents and grandparents.

A new and virtuous cycle is needed and letting low-paid people keep more of their income is only a start. We need to return to a more aspirational economy with higher skills rewarded as the route back to sustainable growth. There is a prize for the party that makes that case.