EACH day, with unfailing regularity, my office in Alloa receives a visit, phone call or email from someone who has had trouble claiming the social security payments to which they are entitled.

Some of the people who come to seek my help have no job, or need extra support to go about their daily lives. They’ve hit hard times and need our society’s social safety net to keep them on their feet and often out of destitution. Some are having problems paying their bills, others have no food at home and no means to pay the gas and electricity required to cook it.

Hardly a day goes by without at least one constituent contacting me regarding issues with their Employment Support Allowance, Jobseekers Allowance or, with depressing and increasing regularity, their application for the new Personal Independence Payments. It’s not unusual to see several new people in a single day. Sadly, and predictably, these cases are remarkably similar in nature. It’s a depressingly familiar story for most MPs’ offices, and one which doesn’t get any easier to hear over time.

In recent months I’ve seen an increasing number of disabled constituents who are struggling against a system which is seemingly weighted against them to get the financial help and support they need. I’ve read their lengthy case files and medical reports, and listened to recordings of their appeal hearings. You can read and hear their fear and frustration as they seek justice from a system which has been distorted and reshaped by successive Westminster governments to penalise, rather than support those in need.

The tragedy is that even now the Tories haven’t finished their goal in dismantling this pillar of our welfare state. Last weekend was another grim milestone in their race to pick apart our social security system.

Last weekend, at the beginning of the financial year, the UK Government introduced a range of new, regressive reforms to the benefits system. These include cuts to the benefits for disabled people, introducing a two-child limit for tax credit payments, stopping young people from claiming housing benefit, changes to benefits for people who’ve been widowed and cuts to Child Tax Credit for new families.

These are all deeply damaging changes, which will hit hardest those who need most support. But two of them, announced by George Osborne last year and implemented by Philip Hammond and Theresa May without a cheep of objection by Ruth Davidson’s Scottish Tories, are particularly alarming.

The cut of around £30 a week for disabled people claiming ESA directly penalises people with a disability. We should seek to support people who need extra help to live and work, not use them as an ATM to prop up the economic impact of Brexit and failed austerity measures.

In November, MPs from nine parties – even including some Conservative MPs – supported the SNP’s calls for the cut to be postponed until alternative financial support was introduced. Despite DWP ministers promising that a package of additional measures would be introduced, we’ve seen no significant changes at all.

Even by this Tory Government’s standards, this cut represents a particularly dark moment. It poses the very real risk of placing those with disabilities, and some of the most vulnerable people in our society, in severe hardship. The DWP has already determined these individuals are unable to work through ill health or disability and yet the Tories have chosen to penalise them further.

The implementation of a two-child limit for tax credit payments is also an astonishing example of Tory heartlessness and incompetence.

Not only does this place an arbitrary limit on the support available to families who are struggling by on a low income, it in turn creates a situation where women who have a third child as a result of rape will have to prove this fact to the DWP before they can receive the payments to which they are entitled. This immoral and unworkable situation has been highlighted at Westminster time and time again over the past year by my colleague Alison Thewliss and others, but still no minister has been able to provide a satisfactory solution to this issue. It’s distressing and harmful for those women who find themselves in this abominable positon, but still the Westminster Tories, backed up by their Holyrood counterparts, refuse to do the right thing.

In the weeks and months to come, Citizens Advice staff, welfare advice teams, MPs and their staff in offices all over Scotland will be left to pick up the pieces of the social and personal damage caused by these heartless and reckless Tory policies.

It’s time we chose a different path.