DAVID BELL’S timely warning in today’s Morning Star about the risks of cutting payments to people with mental health problems underlines just how back-to-front the Tory approach to social security is.

Ever since the insufferably sanctimonious Iain Duncan Smith was appointed to head the Department for Work and Pensions in 2010, he has sought to paint himself as the champion of the very people he persecutes and victimises.

Welfare dependency, he pontificates, is a trap. His much-vaunted “welfare revolution” will take people out of idleness and into productive labour, saving the taxpayer a pretty penny and their souls into the bargain.

This narrative lies behind the government’s whole “make work pay” mantra. Unfortunately this is perhaps the most deeply dishonest presentation of all the Tories’ sinister schemes.

The government is not “making work pay.”

It has forced repeated pay freezes and below-inflation rises on workers in the public sector, meaning real-terms wages have fallen by 15 per cent since 2010.

Chief Treasury Secretary Greg Hands — who along with other MPs trousered a 10 per cent pay rise this summer — helpfully wrote this week to pay review bodies responsible for setting pay rates for millions of teachers, nurses, doctors and other public-sector workers, explaining that not all of them should expect to receive even the 1 per cent maximum increase imposed by George Osborne.

In the private sector, attacks on workers’ rights and trade unions alongside an explosion in zero-hours contracts which has been winked at by the government have seen real wages fall too, by around 10 per cent on average.

And of course workers whose jobs have been outsourced from the public sector to a private company have also seen attacks on their pay and conditions.

Work under the Tories is more insecure and worse-paid than before they came to power. Not a great advertisement.

But have they shown greater zeal when it comes to opening the workplace to the disabled and those with mental health problems?

Hardly.

On the contrary, one of Duncan Smith’s dubious achievements back when the Tories were still cohabiting with the Lib Dems was to shut down 47 of the 54 Remploy factories in the country before privatising the rest, ridding Britain of one of its only disability-friendly employers and costing thousands of jobs.

No-one who witnessed the red-faced minister’s rant at Remploy employees who tried to reason with him, accusing them of sitting around drinking coffee rather than working and then sneering that they should not expect to be able to choose their place of work, is likely to forget it.

In this newspaper disabled author Ruth Hunt described the “gut-churning sense of foreboding” her community felt on election night when it became clear that the Conservatives would return to power.

Within hours their fears were vindicated as access to work funding for blind and deaf people was slashed.

This is not the action of a government eager to see people with disabilities enter the workforce.

Nor are the introduction of employment tribunal fees which price justice out of the reach of many working people, leaving bosses freer to discriminate based on age, sex, sexuality and, yes, disability.

This week we all saw the human cost of the DWP’s “fit for work” mangle when the department — after years of evasion — revealed the thousands who had died after being declared ready for the workplace.

Cutting the welfare lifeline to Britain’s most vulnerable people does not magically prepare them for work, find them suitable jobs if they are able to work or even put pressure on employers to make the adaptations necessary.

If instead of picking pockets Duncan Smith applied his mind to making workplaces fit for disabled people we might see a revolution we could all applaud.