DAVID CAMERON’S gall in claiming that a Labour win this May would “send this country spiralling backwards” and “jeopardise the recovery” beggars belief.

It was his coalition government’s unprecedented spending cuts unleashed from 2010 that did more than “jeopardise” an economic recovery that had already begun — they snuffed it out completely.

Each year of “austerity” has exacerbated the problem, as public services and councils have haemorrhaged jobs and attacks on benefits have crippled the spending power of the poorest in and out of work.

Mr Cameron, standing proudly in front of his road-to-nowhere election poster, bragged about the number of people in work and the number of new businesses allegedly created, as well as about “halving” the deficit.

The last is only true if you calculate the deficit as a proportion of GDP, and in any case masks George Osborne’s disastrous economic mismanagement — the Chancellor has vastly out-borrowed the previous Labour government, with Britain’s total debt rising more between the last election and the end of 2013 than it did in the previous 13 years.

As for the number of people in work, the Prime Minister did not deign to mention what the reality of work is for millions of Britons today.

Let us not forget that on his watch a majority of the now 13 million living in poverty are in work for the first time since records began.

That on his watch, the soaring cost of housing, energy, travel and food has been combined with stagnant and declining wages, meaning having a job is no guarantee that you can pay the bills or feed your family.

Indeed, as noted by Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby just before Christmas, it is not so long since the idea that millions of British people would be forced to attend foodbanks to stay alive would have been unthinkable.

Now it is a bitter reality, alongside the other grim realities of Cameron’s Britain — the explosion in zero-hours contracts, so that being in work no longer provides a regular or predictable income; the sadistic bedroom tax, forcing people out of homes they’ve occupied for years even when there is no suitable accommodation for them to go to; the vilification of disabled people, which has led to a surge in hate crime, and many, many more.

This is their “recovery,” a recovery that still leaves Britain’s economy smaller than it was in 2008 and real-terms wages £50 a week lower than when the City’s reckless gambling blew up in all our faces.

On top of that, the Tories promise yet more cuts if elected this year — with Mr Osborne committed to shrinking the state to 1930s levels.

The PM may prattle that Labour would see Britain “spiralling backwards,” but it is the Con-Dem coalition that has returned us to an age of misery, uncertainty, hunger and fear that working people thought we had seen the back of.