Are we ready for a round of 1940s-style hardship?

He’s reported as saying that the cutbacks will be so bad, they could make the winners of the General Election so unpopular they are kept out of power for a generation.

Considering that the smart money is on government debt of around £60,000 per household (and that’s without our public sector pension, nuclear decommissioning and private finance initiative monies taken into consideration, apparently), it means a fiscal horror show.

But what is this “austerity”? According to the economists – not for nothing is their discipline known as the dismal science – it’s when governments reduce their spending and increase user fees to pay back creditors.

Put like that it sounds relatively harmless, but make no mistake, austerity will come to a street, a school, a hospital and a local authority near you. Just like it did in the late 1940s.

For six years after the end of the Second World War, this country underwent even harsher economic conditions than during the conflict itself. Food was restricted by the government, partly so that it could be sent to feed our starving former enemies in Germany.

One observer, a local government officer called Anthony Heap, summed up the reality of austerity, 1940s style: “No sooner did we awake from the six years’ nightmare of war and feel free to enjoy life once more, than the means to do so immediately became even scantier than they had been during the war.”

He complained that: “Housing, food, clothing, fuel, beer, tobacco – all the ordinary comforts of life that we’d taken for granted before the war, and naturally expected to become more plentiful again when it ended – became instead more and more scarce and difficult to come by.”

This grim state of affairs went on for another nine years.

In the 1940s, rationing and shortages affected almost every area of everyday life. Coal, petrol, cars, clothes, footwear, furniture, bedding, toys – all were hard to come by, being either strictly rationed or near unobtainable. One middle class housewife protested: “The greatest disaster is the inability to buy a handkerchief if one has sallied forth without one.”

Another participant in the Mass Observation project objected that the fuel shortage “entails poor lighting on railways, in waiting rooms etc, with consequent eye strain and depression”.

Even as late as March 1951, the Daily Echo was reporting the 33 per cent cut in sausages available after the Ministry of Food upped rationing.

By August that year housewives were forced to queue to obtain potatoes as the national shortage of the crop worsened.

In 1946, Food News was a staple in the Daily Echo, where we cheerily reported: “Canned Fruit for Christmas: many folk lucky to get one tin.”

In April 1947 we were trumpeting Better Food News with green veg “still very scarce” but “small amounts of spring greens”.

The budget of that year juggled the figures, slapping the equivalent of 16 per cent VAT on cricket bats, balls, bails and soccer shin-pads, hockey equipment but not – bizarrely – ice-hockey equipment!

And the era still has plenty to teach us, not the least of which is how to have a cut-price Olympics. Then, as now, the nation faced hosting a games in 1946 that threatened to be eye-wateringly expensive.

But with typical brio we set about running an Austerity Games. It was only three weeks before the opening ceremony that the government finally got around to converting Wembley Stadium from its incarnation as a dog track into an Olympic venue. Blackout paint was scraped from the glass at Wembley Arena and former Prisoner of War camps were touted as competitor accommodation.

While athletes got extra rations to help them do well – the Americans were so disgusted they bought their own food – female competitors were encouraged to make their own running uniforms.

However stringent the measures to come, it seems unlikely we’ll ever have to resort to food restrictions or making athletes sew their own clothes as we square up to the New Austerity.