With only a few days until the Chancellor’s spending review, the shrieking from the public sector about the impossibility of absorbing any more cuts grows ever more shrill.

Town Halls say they will be unable to provide basic frontline services, despite the fact they are sitting on £22.5billion of reserves and admit some of their bosses are paid like top footballers.

Meanwhile, the police are screeching loudest of all, even though crime is falling sharply and their own budgets have risen by £1.5billion in real terms over 15 years.

Ex-Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Ian Blair went so far as to suggest that people will be killed in a terrorist attack if community policing budgets are trimmed.

Ex-Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Ian Blair (pictured) who suggested that people will be killed in a terrorist attack if community policing budgets are trimmed

What these shroud wavers overlook, however, are figures published last Friday showing Britain has borrowed £54billion this year – adding to a national debt that already stands at a terrifying £1.5trillion.

Eradicating the deficit is not an ideological choice – it is a moral and economic necessity if future generations are not to be saddled with unsustainable debt repayments.

Yesterday, George Osborne twice refused to say if – amid the anti-cuts furore – he might abandon plans for the country to be running a surplus (and therefore paying down its debts) by the end of the Parliament.

If he is wavering, he must stop. Britain’s future national security depends on him sticking to the course.

At Warwick University, a student who dares to question the effectiveness of sending undergraduates to sexual ‘consent workshops’ is vilified as a ‘rapist’ by feminists.

Called a rapist: Second-year George Lawlor, 19, was accused of being 'classist' and 'racist' after claiming he didn't look like a 'typical' rapist

At Oxford, Left-wing campaigners have complained that two planned student balls – one of which has a New Orleans theme, and another which goes ‘back in time’ to the 1920s – are racist, in the latter case because the college had no black students 90 years ago!

The mind boggles at what these posturing, illiberal campus fascists will train their misguided sights on next.

Meanwhile, in what is a real outrage, three major cinema chains are refusing to screen a short Church of England film, which contains a recital of the Lord’s Prayer, in the run-up to Christmas.

Their utterly bizarre logic is that, because the advert promotes a ‘personal point of view’ (ie Christianity), it risks ‘upsetting, or offending, audiences’.

This is despite the Muslim Council of Britain saying it is ‘flabbergasted’ at the idea the prayer would be offensive to anybody, including people of no particular religious belief.

Like the equally absurd campus fascists, the big cinema companies need urgent lessons in Britain’s proud history of free speech and religious tolerance.

AS the Government continued to bang the drum for bombing raids against Islamic State after the Paris attacks, the Chancellor yesterday claimed the West is paying ‘the price of not getting involved’ in Syria.

Rather, isn’t the West paying the price of three disastrous wars it did get involved in: Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – which turned these countries into hotbeds of Islamist terrorism and instability.

Also, if Britain had got ‘involved’ sooner in Syria, we would have been bombing President Assad – not the IS butchers.

Ministers should concentrate less on soundbites about dropping bombs, and more on producing a clear strategy for what would happen next.