George Osborne has attacked criticisms of his plans for further public spending cuts in the next parliament, accusing the BBC of hyperbolic coverage and conjuring up bogus images of the 1930s depression.

The chancellor voiced his anger during a BBC Radio 4 Today programme interview in which he was asked whether he agreed with projections by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) that cuts will reduce the state to its lowest size since the 1930s.

He said: “When I woke up this morning and listened to the Today programme it felt like I was listening to a rewind of a tape of 2010 with BBC correspondents saying Britain is returning to a sort of George Orwell world of the Road to Wigan Pier and that is such nonsense. I would have thought the BBC would have learnt from the last four years that its totally hyperbolic coverage of spending cuts has not been matched by what has actually happened. What I reject is the totally hyperbolic BBC coverage on spending cuts. I had all that when I was interviewed four years ago and has the world fallen in? No it has not.”

Later the Prime Minister’s spokesman said David Cameron agreed with the chancellor’s criticism of the BBC’s coverage.

Saying the deficit has been halved since 2010,Osborne added: “I am the first to say difficult decisions are going to be required. Government departments are going to have to make savings. I am not pretending these are easy decisions or that they will have no impact. But the alternative of a return to economic chaos, of not getting on top of your debts, is not a world I want to live in.”

Osborne said projections of the cuts required in non-protected departments in Whitehall made by the Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank were wrong because they assume no savings would be made in the welfare budget. The chancellor again set out plans to freeze work tax credits and to lower the welfare cap to £23,000.

He said he had already made £20bn of cuts to the welfare budget, adding: “If we didn’t make those decisions on welfare the alternative was to borrow more, massively raise taxes or cut departmental budgets.” He said he wanted a balanced package.

Osborne continued that he had planned for £13bn of extra savings next year, that crime was down and that the health service doing well despite the cuts.

He added he was holding to his pledge for income tax cuts after the election, saying he had increased the personal allowance further in the autumn statement.

Figures published on Wednesday show the Treasury is about a third of the way towards the welfare cuts Osborne said were required before the autumn statement.

In its report accompanying the chancellor’s statement the OBR said public spending would fall from £5,650 a head in 2009-10 to £3,880 in 2019-20.

Public spending as a proportion of gross domestic product was projected to fall to 12.6% in 2019-20, its lowest level since the 1930s.

The OBR chairman, Robert Chote, described it as a “very sharp squeeze”. About 60% of this reduction is forecast to come in the next parliament.

Osborne accepted on Wednesday that the budget deficit – which is expected to be more than £90bn this year – was not closing as fast as he had hoped.

Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, balls has said he will balance the current budget as soon as possible in the next

parliament, but he refused in interviews to be more specific about the timing.

A BBC spokesperson said: We’re satisfied our coverage and analysis has been fair and balanced and we gave the Chancellor plenty of opportunity to respond on the programme. We will continue to ask ministers the questions our audience want answered.”

The Tory Party insisted it was quite happy to face tough questioning, but objected to the tone of a news piece by the BBC correspondent Norman Smith, who said that some of the OBR report read like a Book of Doom. He had reported some of the figures were “utterly terrifying”, suggesting that spending will have to be hacked back to the level of the 1930s is in terms of GDP and saying “it is back to the land of the Road to Wigan Pier”.

Smith had reported that the cuts in non protected departments were nearly two thirds and questioned whether this was achievable. He had added that the autumn statement had also been politically astute and would be easy to sell on the doorstep.