There is no better time for debate than when everyone agrees. That way the contortions, hypocrisy and cant of political actors can be displayed to the world in all their glory. It is a most political act, hypocrisy: one which implies the deferral of truth to power.

The Greek crisis has changed nothing.

So when Osborne stood in the House of Commons, the Labour members erupted in derision at a policy they largely supported. By contrast the Liberals cheered him. At the election they denounced his plans as fiscal lunacy; now their agreement was unanimous. Apparently it was the Greek crisis that convinced them. I’m a Liberal Democrat, and not even I pretend to believe that’s true. In fact they were using a most outrageous get-out: that because the facts had changed, they changed their minds. The facts had not changed. Neither had their minds. It was only the political reality that was different: one where support for fiscal retrenchment was prerequisite to the maintenance of electoral reform. Or something.

I ought to explain the division, or lack of it. A recession is essentially a slump in economic activity. The idea is that by increasing government spending and reducing taxes you keep people in jobs in the public sector, stop businesses going bust, and give people more money to spend. Everyone agrees on this. The split is on the deficit. The government has to borrow money to make up the higher spending and lower taxes: hence, it creates a budget "deficit". This isn’t the cause of the current deficit, but it’s the cause of the reaction to it - you will have spotted one source of lunacy already.

Anyway, should we cut spending and raise taxes in order to reduce the deficit? Of course we should do at least one of those things. A debt is a heavy burden on income. It weighs us down in the future. Now, will cutting the deficit by cutting spending and raising taxes have a negative effect on recovery from the recession? I have absolutely no idea either way. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. Elite economists have absolutely no idea either but they can draw pretty pictures to show that they do, at least, understand why they have absolutely no idea.

Some lines of thought are designed to be a nonsense. One such line is the notion of the "small state". Conservatives have tried to shrink the state in the past. Therefore the spending cuts are an attempt to impose their ideology on an otherwise cowering national dogsbody. You cannot possibly conceive what nonsense this is. Not because it’s empirically wrong: merely that there is no empirical data to be wrong about, because there is no evidence in favour of it whatsoever.

For one thing, as anyone with any knowledge of history will tell you, it is impossible to reduce government spending in anything other than the short term. Neither Thatcher nor Reagan achieved it. It is just too complicated. But more importantly there is cross-party consensus on the need for spending cuts, so Labour presumably wants to shrink the state deliberately as well. It’s rather like the huge critique to be laid on Osborne’s budget. The most cutting in thirty years, yes - but Darling’s preceding budget was the second most cutting. Don’t take dogma seriously; those who wish it on others tend to be thinking that others act too like themselves.

Not, of course, to defend the cuts, which savagely hack at services and make the lives of the poor even more of a misery than they are today. The deficit is clearly a problem, but there are a number of possible solutions. For starters, why not raise tax on the rich? This would easily raise enough money. Vodafone, for instance, has apparently dodged taxes to the tune of £6 billion. The problem with this is that it would supposedly be at least as likely to lead to double-dip recession as spending cuts. Rich people have skills and spend money; poor people don’t. We shouldn’t hit the wealth-makers in times of recession.

But if taxes can’t be raised and services can’t be cut, who will pay for the hole in the budget? One very big thing affects nobody and benefits nobody. It is the armed forces. Abolish Trident, the RAF, much of the navy and Territorial Army and you are, frankly, a lot of the way there. We don’t need any of these things. In the event of Great Power warfare, we will be raising a conscript army, not using our current one. The only thing we are going to need to do is launch surgical injections of elite ground forces on the other side of the world. We are not going to fight with anything larger than a division. By all means make the army better, but reduce it in size. We are not a Great Power and cannot afford to be. Trying to pay for our super-sized army in the post-war era brought us to the brink of bankruptcy. We need to see sense on this.

Clearly none of this is going to happen. But we can at least say we were right.

Osborne is an ewok in wolf’s clothing. He is too afraid of the press. But these sorts of radical cuts to the military can remove at a stroke much (though not all) of the deficit in the Public Sector Net Borrowing Requirement. A crackdown on tax avoidance, coupled with raising taxes for some, would fill much of the remainder. As I said, that will be economically a bad idea. But at least it will protect the poorest, as spending cuts usually won’t. Clearly none of this is going to happen. But at least we can say we were right.