Of course a society that demonises poverty will try to prosecute vulnerable, unpaid carers | Zoe Williams

Being without discernible curiosity about the lives of unpaid carers, or their contribution to society, it looks very much like a benefit handed down from on high; so at the very least, you’d expect the Department for Work and Pensions to keep on top of its administration.

It is accused of intimidatory tactics, against people who may have committed only minor breaches, rewarding them with criminal records and penury that has forced some to sell their homes.

It’s a constituency, then, whose honesty is not in doubt, in which lives are turned upside down by a government department whose monolithic power to prosecute and punish appears untempered by any sense of proportionality, fairness or compassion.

Heinous criminals – such as Mick Philpott, who killed six of his children in an arson attack whose details are still chokingly sad a decade later – were recast as “products of welfare”.

More understandable, if no less catastrophic, was its failure to dispute the idea that it was somehow responsible – through humane policymaking, social welfare programmes and decent public services – for the need for austerity in the first place.

A “common sense” in which welfare claimants were cheats was established, and legislation, regulation and scandal – the benefits sanctions, the three-child cap, the unpaid carers prosecutions – cascaded down from it inexorably.