Universal Credit is a crime against the British people. It must never be forgiven This policy makes Thatcher’s laws seem feeble in comparison.

The Child Poverty Action Group warns this week that working families on low incomes are losing out on benefits because of the way universal credit works. Or doesn’t. This is just one more damning report on the “reformed” system which was supposedly efficient, fair and incentivised jobseeking, published six years after it was meant to be up and running smoothly.

The overspend is staggering. The National Audit Office concludes that universal credit causes severe hardship and “may never deliver value for money”. A good number of claimants are being made homeless and/or destitute. Many go through such brutal assessments that they fall apart and are unable to function. Kids are going hungry. This is ideologically driven social engineering, started by that grim and ghastly Iain Duncan Smith, a millionaire who seemingly believes poverty is self-inflicted, caused by fecklessness and laziness. Very Victorian. He could be a character in Dickens’s Hard Times.

The most unjust Tory policy ever

Universal credit (UC) is the most unjust Tory policy ever. Thatcher’s laws now seem feeble in comparison. When she tried to push through the poll tax, which took from the poor and gave to the rich, ordinary people marched, the Labour left got organised, cities flared up, passions erupted. People beat down the Iron Lady.

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What UC is doing to the vulnerable is far worse than the poll tax. So where is the fire and fury? The afflicted are worn down, frightened, easily duped, unable to rise up against their political masters. So they turn on the migrant, the annoying neighbour, the cash-strapped council and the EU. We in the middle class have been enervated, lethargic. We have not mobilised against the Tory blame game and war on the most needy.

What’s IDS’s game?

New research by Thiemo Fetzer, of the University of Warwick, has found a close correlation between Brexit-backing areas and austerity measures. IDS is a hardline Brexiteer. That gives me the shivers. Was this all part of a long game plan? To deny people basic sustenance , tell them it’s the fault of European bureaucrats and foreign workers?

The next part of the plotline will reveal itself after we leave Europe. Those deprived Brexiteers will feel more planned pain and will get less state help. Jobs will not suddenly materialise, the high streets will not revive. It’s unbearable to imagine such bleakness. Think how it feels to live in it.

I often appear on Channel 5’s morning show The Wright Stuff, watched by the unemployed or casual workers. I meet up with some of them, go to their homes to have tea. Some have no money for sanitary products or toothpaste. They move in an instant between extreme timidity and explosive anger. One lone mum, an eczema and asthma sufferer, told me she wants to die, “…cos I feel like rubbish. Can’t even get them kids shoes.” Now she’s been told by a UC assessor that her chronic health problems are not serious, so she must look for work. I too would want to leave behind such a life. And it’s all going to get harder.

This government is committing crimes against its own people. Never forgive them.

@y_alibhai