Brendan Barber and Ed Balls are just about alone. They are lone voices calling for less cuts in government spending in a sea of screaming demands for cut, more cuts and more cuts. But just because the views expressed by Messrs Balls and Barber are not fashionable, it does not mean they don’t have a point worth considering.

Mr Barber, the top man at the TUC, said this weekend: “The cuts have only just started to bite, when their full extent becomes clear I know that the country will join with us in saying ‘no’ once again to policies that are so eye-wateringly unfair.”

And yet, his views are not commonly held. Sure, we may see a wave of strikes, but it seems unlikely industrial unrest will be anywhere near as serious as that experienced in the UK in the past, or in France today.

The reason is simple: the unions don’t have public backing. Those who work in the private sector resent the perceived privileges of their public sector equivalents. During the recession private sector workers were forced to make sacrifices. And they know their own pension provisions are probably inadequate. Sympathy for state employees is almost nonexistent.

Never before have massive cuts in government spending been so popular.

To be sure, there are benefits to this policy. For one thing, the public sector can crowd out enterprise. For another, huge levels of public debt are not affordable. We have simply got to make cuts.

But the austerity drive is coming without balance. And the alterative point of view is not being fully expressed.

We are not arguing against government cuts. Clearly they are essential, and they are essential now. Under Gordon Brown there was too much wastage. You may recall back in 2004, this column ran a piece under the headline ‘Dr Prudence and Mr Profligate’, in which it was suggested our then chancellor had mutated from the prudent iron chancellor of the late 1990s to a man who seemed hell bent on creating enormous debt problems for the UK.

The snag is that the cuts that are being made are indiscriminate. Good as well as bad services are being cut. Sure, government borrowing has to be reduced, but don’t you believe it when the government says it has no choice but to cut as fast as possible or we will lose support from the markets. The incredibly low yield on UK government bonds shows that the markets are willing to lend to Britain. Just remember, the UK does not have the same problems that other countries do in financing existing debts – for example, UK government bonds tend to have a longer maturity date than bonds drawn on the US and German governments.

Not everything that governments do is bad. Not all nursing, social work, youth worker work with young offenders, work with the unemployed, is bad and wasteful.

But such is the public mood in favour of cuts, that there is little balance. As a result we will see crime rates rise; issues that may have been causing long-term unemployment that were close to being solved, will persist; we will see standards of care provided by charities with some local authority backing, plummet. Life for students is being made intolerable. The voluntary sector, which nonetheless requires some government money, is being starved of cash.

It will get worse. Expertise will be lost, and when finally the inevitable reversal begins, money will wasted reinventing systems and recreating knowledge.

As ever with these things, it is a question of balance. Herd mentality created today’s crisis, and now it is laying the foundations for the next crisis.