Last Friday a sixty-five-year-old man walked into JobCentre Plus in Llanelli. According to his friends, he had diabetes and had been feeling unwell for some time. But in today’s Britain, being in your mid-sixties with a serious health condition is no reason to take time off. So, the Department of Work and Pensions declared him fit for work. He walked into the office that day to attend his appointment and dropped dead while waiting in line.

This is the country Britain has become. Not overnight but year by year, with each new hole ripped in the social fabric producing another stream of moral obscenity until eventually the tide washes over public consciousness and it is no longer capable of outrage. And why would should it be? Why is the Llanelli case any worse than a six-stone man, reduced to skin-and-bone from pneumonia, being found fit for work — and dying only weeks later? Or a sixty-year-old disabled man and a chronically-ill father being driven to suicide by the same assessment? Or someone winning their appeal against being deemed fit for work seven months after they had died?

By July 2017, 5,690 had died within six months of being found fit for work by the Department of Work and Pensions. That same year we discovered that the number of disabled benefit claimants committing suicide had doubled since the scheme’s introduction. People who are suffering extraordinary pain, who are in many cases on their deathbeds, are being ordered by our government to spend their final days squeezing whatever excess value they can from their life — lest anyone be seen to be going easy on “scroungers” or “layabouts.” What kind of a society is that?