Remember this? (Actually from the Conservative Home website currently.)

Long-term benefit claimants could be forced to do manual labour under proposals to be outlined by Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith. Duncan-Smith is due to outline plans for four-week placements doing jobs like gardening and litter clearing. He has apparently signalled that the message will be: “Play ball or it’s going to be difficult.”

This seems like a return to workhouses, last left behind in the Victorian times, along with the last vestiges of venture philanthropism, aka the new Big Society. Social engineering through the back door, some might say.

It now is crystal clear that the Conservatives are using the cuts as a thinly-disguised veil to introduce ideologically and driven cuts which are offensive to a majority of English people who didn’t vote for them. And what is even more disgusting is that they are allowing the Liberal Democrats to bear the brunt of this unpopularity, while the Conservatives are still sky-high in the polls, Nick Clegg says nothing (an old adage is ‘silence is agreement’), the Liberal Democrat activists don’t appear to agree with the substance of what is, after all, a Conservative party. Only a complete fool doesn’t now understand the gravity of the Lib Dems’ situation – how they have utterly sold out.