The last stage of Tory "welfare reform" was an arbitrary maximum limit on annual welfare payments. This was supposed to pressure people into working, even disabled people and people for whom working is logistically impossible.

This policy is a catastrophe for the non-rich, but not for the Tories that set it up. On the contrary, it achieves their goal: to drive the non-rich into ever-worse poverty, to the point that they become a timid and unresisting underclass, useful for intimidating everyone else.

There is one good effect of the policy: that it encourages some women to have abortions rather than babies. In our overpopulated world, with the human population still growing, people ought to ask themselves, "Is it right for me to have a child?" If it would be difficult for you to support one, that is the indirect way that the world shows you that you shouldn't have it.

However, the Tory choice to send this message by denying support to children Tories consider "excess" is cruel and destructive. It condemns real, live children to grow up in poverty, hunger and stress, which gratuitously stunts them for life.