Did you know? The chancellor, George Osborne, is a closet pacifist who would be happy to see the Taliban in charge of his Tatton constituency. The home secretary, Theresa May, is soft on paedophiles and comfortable with child molesters. The justice secretary, Ken Clarke, delights in setting raving criminals free. As for the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, when he hears the word art, he reaches for his axe.

Welcome to the crazy, hyperbolic world of cuts lobbying. It says the government must reduce public spending – in general – but not in particular, and certainly not my particular. Cut the other guy, the one who can't shout; but cut me, and civilisation as we know it is at an end. It will be all the government's fault.

Quangos are like babies: most people are against them until they have one of their own. Then they go all gooey. They gloat over them as they grow limbs and remark to the world how delightfully they smile when fed. Like children, quangos must be defended with our lives against all known predators.

From aircraft carriers to art galleries, from school buildings to police quality control, from medical research to counter-terrorism, there is no public sector activity that is not some mother's son. Every quango has a board to support, a staff, an office block and an ever-widening family of dependent NGOs, regulators, consultants, conference venues and press facilities. What does Osborne expect to come of them all? Must they starve?

Yesterday in the Guardian the director of the Tate, Nicholas Serota, said the impending cuts to arts subsidies were like Hitler's "ruthless blitzkrieg" that would "threaten the whole ecosystem" of civilisation. Whether a school outreach programme equates to the puncturing of the Maginot Line others can decide, but a "Serota" clearly qualifies as a unit of political pressure.

A double Serota thus goes to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Group. One of its champions yesterday defended what has become a gargantuan child protection bureaucracy by accusing the home secretary of indifference to "children being raped, having sex with babies … torture … forced sex with animals … unimaginable evil." It made Hitler in France seem a peccadillo.

The navy goes even better. After desperately trying to shift Trident on to the Downing Street budget (as "not defence"), the navy lobby has been deluging the press with hair-raising scenarios of Tesco shelves emptying of foodstuffs as North Sea convoys are torpedoed by some Dr No – and all for want of an aircraft carrier. Britain is being "left defenceless".

As for the security services, they leap up every week with eyes staring and tongues out, warning of Islamist hordes massing across the Channel and about to open a new flank against Serota's civilisation, should Osborne cut so much as a paperclip from the Security Industry Authority or the Serious Organised Crime Agency.

The herd of lobbyists stampeding through Whitehall is a warning to any government. A quango can be created in a day but it takes blood, sweat, tears and a torrent of abuse to abolish it. Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary, received a pasting this summer for daring to axe the UK Film Council. This relic of Cool Britannia was a conduit for film-makers to give £160m to their friends, lubricated by carousing ministers at Cannes each year. Yet its demise was greeted as the end of cinema as we know it, including protests from Clint Eastwood and other "non-doms" who appear to have been supping at the same trough.

The fiercest lobbyists are the professions. After Gordon Brown stuffed their mouths with gold, the doctors have been relatively quiescent – as well they might, having supposedly been "ring-fenced". But academics, scientists, arts, the BBC and thousands of quango regulators are up in arms. Most can illustrate their case with appeals to national pride and warnings of tarnished glamour. They mobilise friends in the media and wield that new weapon of influence, the internship, awarded to the offspring of the powerful. Above all, they point out that their subsidies are relatively small. Why should ministers risk a double-Serota in the Guardian or the Times for the sake of a mere million or two?

The most effective lobbies exploit middle-class mobility, often with a large dose of bluff. For the last year bankers and hedge fund managers have threatened the chancellor that they are on the brink of "pulling out of Britain" if their bonuses are stopped or overtaxed. The consequence to the public interest is asserted as cataclysmic. Does Vince Cable really want "spivs and gamblers" spinning their wheels in Monaco or Gibraltar rather than Berkeley Square?

The scientists have taken a leaf from the same book. Last week a regiment of researchers was called to the colours with feelgood interests such as cancer, blindness, Alzheimer's and particle physics. They were all "seriously contemplating" emigrating if they did not get what they wanted. One was appalled that he should have to "worry about my next paycheque", while another identified his job with Britain being "in the forefront of the world and not a second-rate nation".

Britain is apparently awash with bankers, cancer specialists, film-makers, scriptwriters and BBC executives, all with the nation's "interest" in their rucksacks and an airline ticket burning a hole in their pockets. Perhaps on their way to the airport these gilded ones might stop to advise pensioners on how to play the same game. Perhaps they too should hire a PR agent and threaten to hightail it to Palm Beach if Osborne does not come up with the readies.

The truth is that when the public sector ship seems to be sinking it is every man for himself. Yet the idea is plain odd that no organisation can absorb a grant reduction of 5% to 6% a year for five years without, as Serota puts it, "threatening the stability of an entire system for cultural provision … that has made Britain a civilised place to live". On my calculation, Osborne at his most extreme would be taking arts subsidy back only to where it was 10 years ago, which was hardly the dark ages.

We all defend the thing we love. But the glaring exceptionalism of cuts lobbying paralyses sensible argument and distorts it against the poor and inarticulate. They cannot sidle up to ministers at parties and throw insults about civilisation on chatshows. They must endure the jibe that "the only real savings are in benefits", and see their entitlements drain away to protect elite subsidies.

• This article was amended on 7 October 2010. The original referred to Teresa May. This has been corrected.