Reducing the welfare bill has involved putting genuine benefits claimants under dreadful pressure. Jobsworths at benefits offices can impose financial sanctions for the slightest bureaucratic transgressions. It is next to impossible to get ESA even if you're critically disabled. Jobseekers are forced into soul-destroying and fruitless hoop-jumping exercises, often involving three days a week spent at job centres, writing hopeless applications and being constantly vetted and interviewed. Everything is now means-tested to death (not that some things shouldn't be, but the rules are draconian).

They can do all this because the unemployed and the disabled haven't got a powerful lobby group or a trade union to fight back on their behalf. Contrast their plight with the immunity enjoyed by tax-avoiding corporations, large, profitable employers who pay so little that the rest of us have to top up wages with in-work benefits, millionaires with offshore accounts and armies of accountants, non-doms, the royals, landlords with tax reliefs who rake all those housing benefits that we're suckered into thinking are feeding a benefits culture, and all the rest of the sleazy parasites.