As a columnist, Simon Jenkins likes to think of himself as something of a high-class contrarian: he invariably allows a consensus to form and then writes against it. There's something of the old-style Tory anarchist about his love of mischief and lofty provocation; his high, rhetorical Oxonian style, so redolent of the 1950s, has served him well through a long career of churning out 1,200 words three times a week to non-negotiable newspaper deadlines. One has to admire the old boy's stamina. And his Olympian range!

"I absolutely love writing columns; in fact, I live to write them," he once told me when I spent a weekend in his company at Casa Ecco, the philanthropist Drue Heinz's house on Lake Como, at a grandly titled conversazione dedicated to the form of the essay.

In the Guardian today Jenkins has belatedly written about George Osborne's austerity Budget and the coalition's hawkish deficit reduction programme. He has allowed a consensus to form -- nearly all the newspapers and columnists support doctrinaire cuts in public spending and are opposed to Keynesian hyperstimulus and deficit spending -- and has now decided to write against it.

Yet, for once, Jenkins is behind the curve as he expresses doubts about the austerity measures and warns of an impending double-dip recession.

Sound familiar? In truth, his column reads as little more than a hasty summary of the position of our own economics columnist, Professor David Blanchflower, who, since he joined us in September last year, has been absolutely consistent in his opposition to the foolishness of slashing spending during a downturn.

As I said recently on Any Questions -- when in response to my contribution Kenneth Clarke conceded, with characteristic candour, that withdrawing stimulus could lead us back into recession -- George Osborne is a conviction politician. He's been very impressive since becoming Chancellor; his performance in the House as he delivered his first Budget was outstanding. He is a low-tax, small-state, social and economic liberal. He believes that there is something morally reprehensible about running large Budget deficits. All of this is sincere.

However, I disagree with him profoundly, and fear that at a time of systemic crisis we are repeating the mistakes of the 1930s, when premature attempts to reduce spending and to balance the Budget plunged Britain and the United States back into severe recession.

At present, it's too early to say how the economy will respond to severe deficit reduction. But the government should have been more pragmatic and more flexible, and it should have learned from the mistakes of the past. It should have remained in wait-and-see mode. "O Lord," wrote Saint Augustine in his Confessions, "give me chastity and continence, but not yet."

Or, as the New York Times said in a recent leader about the coalition's needlessly draconian emergency Budget:

In the days since, the misguided nature of this budget has become clear. Some cutbacks were necessary, if only to reassure Europe's panicky bond markets. But the coalition's budget aims to cut too much too soon, in pursuit of a pointless structural budget surplus by 2015. Its real achievements are more likely to be drastically downsized public services and, if the fiscal austerity backfires, as it well might, a contribution to years of stagnation or worse in Britain and the rest of Europe.

There was more:

No reputable economic theory justifies this bleeding. In fact, most mainstream economists have argued for delaying the most severe cuts until a more robust economic recovery has begun. The coalition budget reflects Conservative Party ideology, which asserts that as the government withdraws money from the economy, private businesses and consumers will step in to replace it. That won't happen if Britons see only hard times ahead.

And already, as David Blanchflower writes in his weekly column tomorrow, all the available data indicates that consumer confidence is diminishing once more.

There may be trouble ahead.

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