George Osborne is, as yet, only the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, but if his party wins next year’s General Election -- and current polling suggests that’s likely -- the cuts he outlined in his speech to the Tory Party conference will be bad news for public sector workers and people approaching retirement age.

Mr Osborne’s plans for economic recovery will mean a pay freeze for four million public sector workers in 2011, except for those earning under £18,000 a year, and if you’re a man who was looking forward to picking up your state pension in 2015, too bad -- you’ll have to wait another year.

While judges, senior NHS managers and civil servants of deputy director grade and above will have their pay frozen, they won’t feel the pain anywhere near as much as the worker struggling to get by on a wage just above the £18,000 threshold.

While Mr Osborne’s prescription to rescue the economy goes further than the plans announced by the man he wants to replace as Chancellor, Alistair Darling, the pay freeze proposed by Mr Darling for the 750,000 highest earners in the public sector is only one of the measures he is expected to reveal in next month’s pre-Budget report.

Senior civil servants are entering the final year of a three-year pay deal next year and Mr Darling wants the agreement torn up.

In July, Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, raised the prospect of an age of austerity under Labour with spending cuts and efficiency savings running through to 2020 and, in the same month, Mr Darling warned he was determined to tackle the scale of public sector debt.

He wasn’t specific about how he would go about it, but his comments raised speculation about the possibility of re-opening multi-year deals with groups such as teachers, health workers and the police.

Unlike the Conservatives, Mr Darling has held back from a blanket freeze on public sector workers’ pay, so teachers, nurses, the police and non-senior civil servants would still be in line for a rise along with thousands of other workers.

That situation is mirrored in Scotland under current SNP policy. Its ministers have voluntarily agreed to a pay freeze, but as yet they have no plans to extend it to other sectors.

That doesn’t mean to say it won’t happen, because they are following the same approach as the Treasury.

For now, however, Finance Secretary John Swinney is treading warily, pointing out that he doesn’t have the budget information for 2011-12 but knows that under current plans Scotland will be getting less to spend from Westminster.

His idea is to take decisions on public sector pay policy in a “proper and timely fashion”, according to his spokesman, when the information becomes available.

And as Labour and the Tories argue over “Labour spending versus Tory cuts”, the SNP says it doesn’t believe that “Dutch auctions at party conferences is the proper way to determine these matters”. The issue has been neatly ducked -- for now.

However, it will have to be faced and the Scottish TUC is determined that the people it represents should not be targeted by governments of any political shade.

Rather than focus on people who are not rich, its assistant director Stephen Boyd says the Treasury should do more to recover the estimated £40bn lost through tax evasion and tax avoidance and to collect from about 200 of the UK’s top companies that effectively pay no corporation tax.

He warns of the Japanese experience: when the strong economic growth of the 1980s ended at the start of the 1990s when the stock market crashed, a large proportion of debts turned bad and banks had to be bailed out by the government. It became known as “the lost decade” when economic expansion came to a total halt.

Mr Boyd argues that cutting public spending curtails the public’s ability to spend with the consequent knock-on effect for the economy.

The British Chambers of Commerce sees things a bit differently, backing the pay freeze and attempts to deal with “too costly” public sector pensions, and supporting the 50% tax rate for high earners while keeping it under review in case highly-skilled people move abroad.

Mr Osborne’s speech cast him in the curious position of a high-level opposition politician with a good chance of taking power at Westminster in just a few months promising more pain than the present government.

He may be out-manoeuvred by Mr Darling when the Chancellor presents the pre-Budget report next month.

The Shadow Chancellor asserts that “we’re all in this together”, but it will take the General Election to test whose policies “we” are backing to get the economy back on track.