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THE timing has been simultaneously perfect and awful.

The same week that the Government launches their Welfare Bill – a vicious, concerted attack on the poor that eclipses anything even Thatcher would have dreamed of – a psychotic egomaniac is sentenced for killing his children, handing the right-wing the perfect benefits bogeyman.

If one were inclined towards conspiracy theories, well…

By any standards, Mick Philpott is a terrible human being. An abuser of women. A moral vacuum capable of using his own children’s lives as bargaining chips.

The stark facts of Philpott’s life are undoubtedly depressing – 17 children by five different women, thousands of pounds a month in benefits payments, his council house a Tory wet dream of Sky TV, snooker tables and PlayStations all funded by the taxpayer.

And so it goes, overnight Philpott becomes a demon. A cipher used to represent every single person claiming benefits in the UK.

No matter that the case is so extreme as to render it useless as an example, here’s what we get across the front page of the Daily Mail – Vile Product Of Welfare UK.

Below this headline it carried a picture of the six children who died in the blaze caused by Philpott in a half-witted attempt to frame his ex-partner and foil her attempts to get custody of the children and, yes, the child benefit that came with them.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a more callous, cold-hearted attempt to make political capital out of the deaths of the innocent.

Those children, aged five to 13, died in their beds, choking to death on toxic fumes.

The eldest boy survived for two more days in intensive care, fighting but failing to hold on to life.

Further inside the Daily Mail, AN Wilson writes: “Those six children, burnt to a cinder for nothing, were, in a way, the children of those benevolent human beings who, all those years ago, created our state benefits system.”

The strange sensation on top of your foot is your jaw hitting it on its way to the floor. Yes, he’s saying exactly what you think he’s saying – the benefit system killed those children because it created and enabled their father.

And hopefully AN Wilson will, in a way, burn in hell for using the deaths of these children to further his own political agenda.

(Image: ITV)

Others joined the chorus. Alison Pearson wrote an article for The Telegraph with the headline Mick Philpott: A Good Reason To Cut Benefits. The Sun said: “Let’s hope this is the last time the State unwittingly subsidises the manslaughter of children.”

This is hate talk. It is using a terrible crime – an aberration – to generate rage at a specific group of people.

And why is the debate even on the table? Benefit “scrounging”, “fraud”, whatever you want to call it, costs us a fraction of what tax evasion costs us. But it’s not such a good story, is it?

A couple of men sitting in a boardroom reeking of Boss in designer suits as they structure a complex offshore tax shelter just doesn’t play as well as the real-life Shameless, an unruly extended family spilling out of their council house.

Greedy, devious, amoral bankers caused the crash and wrecked our economy. Not the people claiming disability benefit, working tax credits and unemployment benefit. But, again, it just doesn’t make such easy copy.

Here’s how it will play out over the coming weeks. We’ll see David Cameron, George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith on TV and in the House of Commons all saying it was a “deplorable tragedy”. That Mick Philpott was an evil man. They’ll perhaps say things about how “the extreme case of Mick Philpott”, a man claiming thousands of pounds a month in benefits, has only “highlighted” the urgent need for the kind of welfare reform the Government are bringing about.

None of them will go quite as far in a public statement as saying: “The welfare system murdered those children.” But they won’t have to – because their journalistic fellow-travellers have already got the lie across for them.

So tax evasion by the likes of Google, Amazon, Starbucks, Facebook and countless other corporations – all happily sanctioned by Osborne, all costing the UK economy more than a million Mick Philpotts ever could – will continue.

Meanwhile, very soon, many people are going to have to live on just over £7 a day to cover gas, electricity, transport, food, clothing and entertainment.

We’re all losers in this. Double losers. You weep with sorrow and rage for the needless deaths of those children. Then you weep all over again at the terrible lies and falsehoods perpetrated in their names.

The lie that we are not a wealthy nation (on Thursday, the day the Philpotts were sentenced, Cameron paid a visit to the nuclear submarine HMS Victorious, reaffirming our £100billion investment in renewing Trident).

The lie that we cannot afford to help our poor and disadvantaged.

The lie that an unseen army of Mick Philpotts is bleeding us dry. On Thursday, Osborne just happened to be in Derby, where the murders took place. He said Philpott’s lifestyle would “raise questions for society”.

In life, the Philpott children – with their names like Duwayne and Jayden – would have been seen by the hand-wringing columnists as, at best, unfortunates, born in the gutter and unlikely to rise.

In death, they became a saintly battering ram used to beat their own kind. As the week wore on, as I read the headlines, columns and opinion pieces, I increasingly thought – and there’s no other way to put this: whither kindness? Whither compassion? Whither decency? When did we begin to hate our poor? When did we become such a vicious country? Have none of these people read Dickens?

I began to feel almost sorry for these hatemongers. I began to wonder how well they sleep at night.

Because, really, God help these people. You know? God help them.