ARE you a low paid worker? If you are you’re not the strivey kind of hard working family that the Tories swore blind they’d protect when with the assistance of yoonocious journalists who just swear a lot they were canvassing for the votes of low paid workers. If you struggle to make ends meet on a zero-hours contract paying you the minimum wage for those hours that your employer does deign to give you work, you’re the wrong kind of striver. The right kind of striver is a board member of an Internet search company, a yoon journalist, or an MP in search of a directorship.

Those kinds of striver get very well rewarded, but those who work hard but are so badly paid that they still need financial assistance are to be punished. You might think that it ought to be the companies paying people such a pittance that they can’t make ends meet which ought to be in line for a bit of castigation, and in a sane and normal world that’s what would happen. After all, if you can’t afford to pay your workers a wage that they can live on, you have no business making a profit.

However we don’t live in a sane and normal world, we live in the nightmare of a Scotland which voted to prostrate itself before governments that someone else votes for.

Unfortunately for us, they choose to vote for governments that view Scotland as a savage dystopia of Mad Macs and which treats us, and the poor of England, accordingly. Iain Duncan Smith does bear a worrying resemblance to Immortan Joe, come to think of it.

In line with its commitment to provide greater value for taxpayers in the provision of random and capricious cruelty, the Department of Work and Pensions is trialling a new range of sanctions for low paid workers who are so badly paid that they still qualify for government assistance with their income.

The DWP claims that its new line in whips, chains, and electroprods are aimed at “redefining the contract between claimants and the welfare state”. This is presumably a nicer way of saying that they are aiming at redefining work as slavery and redefining a benefits claim as a reason for abuse that’s so outrageously undeserved and counter productive that even a swerry yoon journo would have to apologise for it on Twitter.

If you are working on the minimum wage and miss a Job Centre appointment because your employer has called you in that day, from now on you’ll risk losing your social security payments. Lose your job or lose your benefits, that’s the choice the Tories give people slaving away on the lowest wages.

Punishing poor people for being poor is in accordance with the tried and tested Tory principle that the rich need to be rewarded to make them more productive, but the poor need to be punished to make them more productive. So don’t go about claiming that the Tories don’t have principles. They do have principles. It’s just that their principles are greedy, avaricious, cruel and vindictive, exactly like the DWP under Immortan Joe’s leadership.

FOLLOWING this Tory logic, somewhere between the poverty level requiring punishment and the obscene wealth requiring reward there must be a sweet spot of income where absolutely no action at all is required in order to promote productivity. You’d think that a government which claims to value market forces and non-intervention would do all it could to tax the obscenely wealthy and give the money to the poorly paid until everyone was at the sweet spot of perfect income, then it could sit back claim that it had achieved its free market nirvana. Then the only people who would be impoverished would be the parasites who make poverty porn for Channel 5.

What the DWP hasn’t explained is how sanctioning the income of a person who works 16 hours a week stacking shelves in a supermarket for the minimum wage is going to make the supermarket offer them more working hours a week. The supermarket worker is already working as many hours as they have been offered. If you’re motivated enough to get up and go to work for a slave wage then you’ve already proven that you’re not the sort of person who would prefer a live as a star in a Channel 5 poverty porn show instead of making your own way in life. That’s not enough for this government that Scotland didn’t vote for. You still must be punished for your poverty.

But it’s not really about incentivising the poor. What the DWP’s actions are really about is making the poor pay for the greed of the rich. It’s about slashing government expenditure on social security so that large corporations can continue to pay risible amounts of tax. Harrying people who are on low wages to increase their income will only further enrich employers who don’t pay a living wage. Those employers then make donations to the Tory party, which encourages the tax authorities to go soft on their tax claims, encouraging the rich directors to enrich themselves even more. It’s the workers on poverty wages who end up driven into the ground, while tax evading directors get to drive themselves off in a nice new and every expensive car.

The World Bank estimates that £70 billion in tax is uncollected due to avoidance, evasion and fraud. A mere £1.2m is lost in benefits fraud, while £1.4bn is spent in benefits overpayments. Meanwhile £16bn in social security payments that should go to the poor and the vulnerable remain unclaimed. If the Government invested just a tenth of the effort it spends in harassing the poor in chasing the taxes that the rich don’t pay, there would be no need to make the lives of the working poor even more precarious than they are.

Still, punishing poor people makes the swerry right-wing yoon journos happy, as it leads to the possibility of a voice-over gig on a Channel 5 shaming show. So it all ends well for everyone except the poor saps struggling and failing to make ends meet on the minimum wage.