The choreographed process of softening up for today’s Budget has been skilful; barely a day goes by without another grim warning about the dangers to the nation from the build-up of debt, and with it a new round of cuts. Britain is the new Greece, we are told. We need to act, and now.

Yet even if ministers are correct in this analysis – and there are plenty of respected economists who doubt it – it inevitably leaves public servants feeling demonised, scapegoated and abused, despite routine declarations about their hard work and devotion.

True, there are well-documented cases of public sector staff who are paid obscene amounts – local authority chief executives and BBC bureaucrats are egregious examples. Three public servants now earn more than £1m, and 171 are paid in excess of £150,000 a year, more than the Prime Minister. Yet these lucky few have to be set in a context of 6 million public sector workers, the vast majority on unenviable “packages” – the man who empties the bins on £12,000 a year; the nurse auxiliary on £13,000; the classroom assistant on £14,000. Their pensions, when they arrive, will be a few thousand pounds a year, and taxable.

Average regular pay in the public sector, excluding financial services, was £454 per week in April 2010. By comparison, average regular pay on the same basis in the private sector was £419 per week. That is not such an enormous gulf. Public sector pay did catch up with the private sector under Labour, although the gap has not narrowed much in more recent years. But much of that was in response to public shame about the poverty pay that nurses, for example, received. Politicians and parents agreed that gifted headteachers should be rewarded well. Our armed forces remain underpaid by most standards.

In the lean years under the last Conservative government, many low-paid public workers could not even afford the contributions to their supposedly lavish pension schemes. Now reformed, you will receive just 1/80th of your final salary for every year you spend in the NHS. Thus after 20 years, a qualified, experienced nurse will see a pension of just one-quarter of final salary, say £7,500 or so.

The money that goes into the public sector is not uniformly wasted on fat cattery, an obvious point that is worth repeating in the present feverish climate. Most of the core functions of the public sector need to be done, and the state cannot be suddenly cut back without any harmful effects. Students will still need to be taught by lecturers, rotten teeth extracted by dentists, babies delivered by midwives, a war to be fought in Afghanistan, drunks to be arrested on a Saturday night, children to be protected from harm. Less emotively, we will still need stats to be gathered, weather forecasts to be made. We may soon discover just how difficult it is to find real waste in the public sector, and how meanly in reality we look after those who help us with extraordinary dedication. Or is all this more ideologically driven?

Britain is not Greece. We have our own currency, so we are not trapped in a currency zone unable to devalue; our debt has a much longer maturity, so we don’t have to roll it over so often and risk a crisis; our national debt will peak at about 75 per cent of GDP – better than most of Europe, and where it was in the 1960s. At the end of the Second World War it stood at 262 per cent of GDP, and we went ahead and built a welfare state. Most of it is owed within the UK. It is not “out of control”.

Even Mr Osborne’s much-vaunted Office for Budget Responsibility admitted that public borrowing was about £11bn less than anticipated last year, and would be £8bn better this year even if Mr Osborne left Alistair Darling’s plans untouched.

The Liberal Democrats have now apparently undergone a Damascene conversion to Tory fiscal principles. Yet, in a world that seems impossibly remote now, the general election campaign, Vince Cable and Nick Clegg were warning time and again about the dangers of cutting too early, of the panic cuts that could undermine the recovery, of taking risks with people’s jobs and homes. It is odd indeed to hear them sound more Tory than the Tories. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research says a full-blown Tory attack on the deficit would push us into a double dip recession.

There has been some unfortunate briefing too about ministers actually enjoying “throwing the axe around”, taking some sort of sadistic joy in it. And was it not David Cameron who told us not so very long ago that cutting down on waste was the oldest trick in the political book?

To turn the Prime Minister’s soundbite around, the suspicion is that the Government is cutting as heavily as it is not because it has to, but because it wants to.

Case studies: ‘People don’t know how hard we work’

Steve Holman, 50, bus driver in east London. Earns around £29,000 a year

I’ve worked for the same bus company in east London for 26 years, but I’m massively worried about the impact of the Budget on Transport for London.

It’s quite simple – either they pass the cuts on to passengers, which they won’t do, or on to services without affecting passengers, through cuts to wages.

I work anything from a 38-hour week to a 60-hour week. I’ve worked for 26 years, on an average of six days a week – sometimes seven – in order to live in London.

When you speak with the general public they don’t understand how hard we work. We develop an affinity with them though.

I earn £29,000 a year, which is one of the better positions, but we’re not in an enviable position. We take home £350 a week and in London that’s not a king’s ransom, is it?

I’m massively against any cuts in services to London passengers. We’ve spent years building the network up. It will have an effect on passengers travelling on buses.

Bob Sutcliffe, 58, grave digger for Warrington Borough Council. Earns £20,500

I first started working for the council 15 years ago. I enjoy it, but it’s hard work. You never know how much work there’s going to be, and it’s not like you can say, “No, we’ll do it tomorrow.” This week we did nine graves, but it’s a year-round job, and you get more in winter.

We’ve got a mini-digger, but it can’t get to all the plots. If we can use the machine it takes two-and-a-half hours per grave. If we’re doing it by hand it takes all day. There’s five of us, working across four cemeteries, 8 ’til 5.

I don’t think we could be stretched any further, especially as we have to do other jobs too.

Denise Boyce, 26, nurse. Earns £22,663

I qualified in April and work in the neonatal unit at St George’s in Tooting, where I’m doing intensive care training. I work mainly with premature babies on life-support machines, and I help new mums with breast-feeding. It’s hard work but very rewarding – although not financially. We’re the leading neonatal unit for south-west London, but we’re pretty stretched. We’ve got 140 nurses for 36 cots. It might seem like a lot, but that’s on a 24-hour system, and most of the babies require one-to-one care.

This week’s budget brings on an awesome economic and political moment. The former Labour government had already committed to a greater and faster reduction in the budget deficit than any British government in modern times. The coalition government wants to do more; to nearly eliminate a structural budget deficit of 8% of national output – some £116bn – in five years. Moreover, it wants spending cuts to take 80% of the load. No country has ever volunteered such austerity. It is as tough a package of retrenchment as the IMF imposed on Greece, a country on the brink of bankruptcy. It is twice as tough as the famously harsh measures Canada took between 1994 and 1997. It is three times tougher than Sweden’s measures between 1993 and 1995. In British terms, it is immeasurably tougher than what we did after the IMF crisis in 1976 or after the ERM crisis in 1992.

If we are going to embark on such a course, there has to be a national consensus that it is right. What is proposed, if we are to believe the pre-budget speeches and leaks, is the closest to an economic scorched earth policy we will ever have lived through. If it is to work, we have to be prepared to accept not just enormous economic sacrifice, but to regard it as legitimate. There has to be complete honesty about why the measures are being taken. The reasons have to be unanswerable. The economics must be unimpeachable. The measures themselves have to be extremely skilfully implemented and seen to be fair.

This is not the case just now. Of course the structural deficit has to be eliminated. But Britain has time to make the change. Sweden took 15 years to lower some departmental spending by 20%, not the five years the government plans. We are not in the position of Greece. Britain has a diversified economy. Our cumulative national debt is not large by international standards. Uniquely, the term structure of our debt is very long – around 14 years. Most of this year’s debt will be sold to British domiciled individuals and companies, so the international sovereign debt crisis has much less impact on us. The level of interest on the national debt in five years’ time as a share of national output is more than manageable. These are the truths about the situation; to claim otherwise creates distrust.

I don’t think either coalition partner is aware of how high the stakes are being raised, the degree to which they are unnecessarily backing themselves into a corner, and how much the ground has to be prepared before launching the country on the unprecedented path they plan. For example, each of the counter-arguments I have raised needs to be carefully argued against, not shouted down by hysterical remarks about the sovereign debt crisis or references to private lectures from the not infallible governor of the Bank of England.

Both Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg know that their popularity will fall, but if the coalition really means what it says the consequence could be much worse. The lack of necessity over what is planned could knock the Lib Dems back to where the Liberal party was in the 1950s – a party of the margins – and irredeemably rebrand the Conservatives as the nasty party. The revival of liberal conservatism and the hopes raised by this unique experiment in coalition government will collapse.

George Osborne‘s aggression is hard to understand. The forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility show that the outgoing Labour government’s plans were both credible and more than tough enough to arrive at budgetary sustainability. To go beyond them with between £24bn and £50bn of extra spending cuts and tax rises, as is rumoured for Tuesday, is unconscionable and will rightly be challenged. The ground has not been laid; the economics are dubious even for deficit hawks; the support tiny; the implications dire.

It is not too late for a change of course or, at the very least, to reproduce the best of what the Canadians and Swedes did. In neither country was deficit reduction portrayed as a necessity to keep a triple A credit rating on government debt, nor as a vendetta against a “bloated” public sector, as the coalition has suggested. Rather, the measures were sold as a vital period of pain in order to create a platform for much-needed public spending growth in the future. It was important for the legitimacy of both countries’ plans, as an intriguing series of essays, “Dealing With Debt”, from the thinktank CentreForum sets out, that the pain was implemented by parties of the centre and centre-left who believed in public spending. The public was readier to believe the need for cuts. The story in Canada and Sweden was that aggressive belt-tightening would release more spending in future. As a result, both governments could propose short-term reductions in pensions, unemployment benefit, wider welfare benefits and public sector wages as part of the package and get grudging acceptance. In neither country was any department or area of spending ring-fenced.

There were exceptions. Both governments symbolically wanted to show their belief in spending even amid the cuts. The Swedes boosted investment in universities, science and primary and secondry education, and while cutting unemployment benefit, they provided grants for 100,000 young people to go to university. The Canadians made sure that the poorest in Canada were insulated from the cuts. They also launched a national consultation to decide on which cuts and explain the rationale. Even so, it was a hazardous exercise. As John Springford, the essays editor comments, success depended upon a buoyant world economy.

Osborne is said to have studied the Canadian experience, hence his call for a period of national consultation between Tuesday’s budget and the autumn’s spending review, copying what was done in Ottawa. The trouble is that the terms of the consultation preclude any genuine consultation; the assumption is that spending is bad, the state needs to be smaller, nothing is more important than a triple A credit rating, and the British way of life has to change.

It is folly. Not every penny of public spending is well spent. There has to be restraint and the deficit must be lowered. Wages, pensions and welfare transfers must take a short-term hit, as they did in Canada and Sweden. But the government should also be investing in our future. It should be raising taxes on those best able to contribute. Every department should share in the pain.

I am surprised at the Liberal Democrats. They have an obligation to their party, their tradition and the coalition to argue more fiercely for a better presented, fairer, more legitimate and more balanced approach to deficit reduction than the one that is promised. And what is proposed is no good for the Tories either. Number 10 and the Treasury believe the worst can be offset by aggressively low interest rates and more quantitative easing. They will work to a degree. But what is proposed still risks everything. Politicians pay the price with lost office. Millions of British will pay a higher price – the needless squandering of their lives.

As noted in our Politics Summary, George Osborne is taking a bit of a kicking today over his pre-election claims that Britain was risking a “Greek tragedy“. But an unreported section of the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ analysis yesterday of the Office for Budget Responsibility report suggests that Labour’s planned tax increases would have delivered the fiscal retrenchment that the Chancellor was committed to and that the only justification for any new tax rises, such as to VAT, is either an admission that their plans have the wrong balance of spending cuts to tax increases or to pay for the Lib-Con’s masochistic and ideologically driven tax cutting plans.