I missed the political theatre surrounding yesterday’s announcement of the coalition government’s comprehensive spending review (CSR). While the chancellor George Osborne was telling MPs in the House of Commons how he would cut £81 billion from the state budget by 2014-15, I was having a much more uplifting time attending the CIPD Northern Ireland skills conference in Belfast.

But once news filtered through that Osborne had slashed the public money Westminster directs to Northern Ireland by almost 7 per cent in real terms, putting around 20,000 jobs in the firing line in a small nation highly dependent on public employment, my mood grew sombre. And having now had a chance to look at the CSR in full I’m even more concerned about its impact on the UK economy as a whole, not to mention the general well-being of our society.

The chancellor says the coalition’s austerity package aims to deliver public service reform, to do so in a way that promotes fairness, and will help to boost economic growth. Osborne scores highly on reform – getting more from less is the only way he can justify the scale of cutbacks he has made, averaging 19 per cent in real terms across Whitehall departments and around 25 per cent for local authorities. So radical change to the way services are financed and delivered is a necessity.

But the coalition’s measures are the complete opposite of being fair, hitting the poorest hardest relative to their incomes by slashing a total of £18 billion from welfare spending. As for growth, the chancellor must surely have his fingers firmly crossed. While he talks of a hard road leading to a better future he could well be putting us on a dangerous path back to recession.

Even in the best case scenario, Cameron, Osborne and Clegg admit that an estimated 490,000 public sector jobs will go by 2014-15. This figure – derived from forecasts made by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) at the time of the emergency budget in June – is obviously high but a lot lower than some independent estimates, including that of the CIPD, which put likely public sector job losses as a result of the austerity drive closer to 700,000. What the CSR conveniently understates, however, is that the OBR’s complete forecast suggests a loss of 660,000 public sector jobs between 2010-11 and 2015-16.

The acid test of Osborne’s axe wielding will of course be whether job creation in the private sector at the very least offsets mass public sector downsizing. I have no doubt that the private sector is capable of this and much more in the medium term, if the economy mounts a decent recovery. But the next couple of years might at best be ‘jobs light’. If so, history will judge this chancellor and this coalition harshly for its fervour in cutting public spending. My personal guess is that today’s CSR will prove to be fiscal folly on a grand scale rather than an exercise in prudent fiscal foresightedness. Either way, we won’t have to wait too long to find out.