Blanchflower: Osborne's cuts will make 5m jobless

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Blanchflower, an employment expert who left the Bank's monetary policy committee at the end of May, said: "Unemployment is going to continue to rise this year and may keep on rising. If spending cuts are made too early and the monetary and fiscal stimuli are withdrawn, unemployment could easily reach four million.

"If large numbers of public sector workers, perhaps as many as a million, are made redundant and there are substantial cuts in public spending in 2010, as proposed by some in the Conservative Party, five million unemployed or more is not inconceivable. They could be our lost generation."

The comments came in an article for tomorrow's New Statesman magazine, which also included a personal attack on Osborne.

"It is not hard to work out that, with unemployment rising fast, it isn't the right time to cut public sector jobs, wages or public spending for that matter," wrote Blanchflower.

"Mr Osborne, I really don't know which economists are advising you on this brilliant strategy to increase unemployment, but feel free to give me a call."

The attack on Osborne came two weeks after Blanchflower branded Governor Mervyn King "the old iron fist of the Bank of England" whose "hawkish views on rates dominated the MPC" early in the financial crisis.