Both Osborne's £6.2bn austerity package and the Queen's Speech of the following day, give precious few details as to the real price tag attached to all of this for the working class. How many jobs will be cut as a result? Which services will be hit? How will our standard of living be affected? Ministers did not say.

Could it be that they are worried about a backlash? After all, only days before Osborne's announcement, the annual conference of the Police Federation was warning against "social unrest" breaking out in Britain, just as it did in Greece.

What's in the small print...

However, there are some clues as to what Osborne has in store, if one reads between the lines of his "first step" austerity package.

Education was supposed to be "ring-fenced". Yet computer spending in schools is to be slashed, as well as programmes designed to help children who are falling behind. And 10,000 places in universities will be cut. Of course, the better off, who can afford to pay for private tuition, send their kids to well-equipped private schools and fork out the cost of university tuition fees, won't suffer from these cuts!

Transport also faces the axe. State-owned Network Rail, already slashing 1,500 jobs due to Brown's austerity measures, is losing another £100m, meaning more job cuts and even less track maintenance and renewal regardless of the cost to safety. At Transport for London, a £108m cut will mean either more job cuts than already planned under Labour, or yet another fare increase!

The £1.7bn that Osborne plans to "save" by "delaying or stopping government contracts and projects" actually means that an unknown number of jobs will be cut by private companies carrying out contract work for the government. But it also means that any improvement in public services which might have resulted from these contracts will be shelved for the foreseeable future.

Likewise, the £1.1bn cuts in local authority grants, together with the greater "freedom" given to local councils to organise "their own cuts", mean that the current cuts in local jobs and services will be much deeper. At the same time the one-year freeze on civil service recruitment does not just mean a cut in the number of civil servants, but also a cut in the number of job vacancies for the unemployed.

If Osborne's announcement was crafted to conceal its real impact, the Queen's Speech was just an exercise in demagogic hypocrisy. Behind the cover of (Cameron's) benevolent sounding language, its 23 bills contain all the elements of a devious all-out attack against the working class.

... And more to come

In education, we are told that schools will have "more freedom" to become "academies" - meaning that it will be easier for private profiteers to take them over! Also, parents will be able to set up "free schools" - that is, of course, those who can afford it! As for the others, with the cuts planned by Osborne, the only "freedom" they will have will be to get a worse education for their children.

Likewise for pensions. As a sweetener for bringing forward Labour's increase in retirement age, we are told that the link between pensions and earnings will be restored. And we are meant to see this as some kind of largesse for which we should be grateful. Except that, today, real earnings are going down, due to wage freezes, outright wage cuts and unemployment, while the Retail Price Index is at 5.3% (an 18-year high!) - which means that pensioner poverty will carry on increasing!

And there are overt attacks: a turn of the screw on the jobless to "help them into work", which, given the absence of jobs, means that fewer will get benefits; the implementation of Labour's NI contribution rise for workers, but not employers; a revival of Labour's part-privatisation of Royal Mail, meaning yet more attacks on postal workers' jobs and conditions; etc..

And this is only the part of the austerity iceberg that the government has dared to unveil so far. But there is a lot more to come, judging from David Laws' statement that there are "even tougher decisions" ahead. Indeed, the "real" cuts are meant to come with the "emergency budget" on 22 June and in the spending review planned for the Autumn.

So, yes, the government should be worried about a backlash. Whether it is tomorrow, or the next day, these attacks, coming after those we already experienced under Labour, will indeed spark off an explosion of anger across the working class. And that will be our chance, not only to make the profiteers pay for their crisis, but also to get rid, once and for all, of this bankrupt profit system.