Our sensitive Chancellor of the Exchequer is upset that the BBC has the temerity to question him over his planned public spending cuts.

If George Osborne has a row to pick with anyone, it should be with the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which he set up on becoming Chancellor.

OBR chairman Robert Chote warned of a “very sharp squeeze,” with per capita public expenditure sliding from £5,650 in 2009-10 to £3,880 in 2019-20.

For good measure, Chote forecast that 60 per cent of these cuts would take effect in the next Parliament.

However, rather than tackle his own OBR baby or come clean on his role as axeman, Osborne chooses to retreat into Bullingdon bully mode, sneering at BBC “hyperbole” and boasting that the world hasn’t fallen in because of his government’s austerity agenda.

There is a logic to the OBR figures given that Osborne, having fallen down on his original plan to wipe out the spending deficit, now blusters about wanting to lock in Parliament to a books-balancing pledge by 2018.

He insists that eradicating the deficit can only be done by slashing expenditure or raising taxes and that government must live within its means.

Comparing stewardship of the economy with domestic households having to pay their bills is a jaded artificial ploy.

Leaving aside the conservative coalition’s single-minded determination to prevent working people from making ends meet by squeezing pay and in-work benefits while inflation lets rip, the comparison doesn’t work.

The sixth-largest economy in the world doesn’t risk being made bankrupt. Nor does it have to balance its books every year.

It can carry a deficit at a time when global interest rates are negligible and borrowing to stimulate growth and meet human needs makes a great deal of sense.

Taking low-interest loans to invest in green energy projects, modernisation of our transport network or a massive council housebuilding programme would encourage research and development, provide skilled and well-paid jobs and ease problems associated with employment and accommodation.

It would also give a kick-start to government tax receipts that have stagnated as a result of low pay, underemployment and job insecurity.

Despite his claims of hyperbole, Osborne is, along with his free-market fanatics in both the Tory and Liberal Democrat parties, ideologically committed to a smaller state that rejects the ethos of social solidarity.

This notorious coalition had no mandate for its economic programme, which includes a destructive top-down reorganisation of the NHS in the interests of largely US-based private health companies.

The Tories want to sneak back into office in a similarly underhanded way as they did in 2010.

That project would be undermined if they were actually made to cough up their plans for public expenditure, especially for cuts in welfare and a rise in VAT.

Osborne dodges questions on both issues, waffling on about no-one knowing better than him the difficulties ahead and the need for “difficult decisions” to be taken.

Unfortunately, “difficult decisions” rhetoric has been nicked from the new Labour lexicon of Ed Balls, Chris Leslie and Chuka Umunna whose opposition to the Chancellor’s cuts agenda is of degree rather than principle.

The labour movement must not be mesmerised by bankers’ obsessions with debt and deficit.

An alternative vision in which working people’s living standards take precedence over monetarist orthodoxy would be a vote-winner and would offer a more sustainable model.