NATALIE LEAL and Anita Bellows have done a noble thing in exposing the horrific links between the suicides of vulnerable people and the increasingly vindictive sanctions being applied to them by the Department for Work and Pensions.

This newspaper's columnist, the author Ruth Hunt, has already described in heartrending detail the pain and fear felt by so many disabled citizens on realising that the Conservatives had been returned to power.

Worse, their chief persecutor over the past five years - Iain Duncan Smith, the freeloading Tory grandee who lives rent-free at his in-laws' mansion - has been kept in place by David Cameron to continue his campaign to unravel the social security safety net that binds our society together. 

The Tories say welfare "reform" is necessary because unemployment is too high. They need to "make work pay."

The Morning Star agrees unemployment is too high. It's been too high since their idol Margaret Thatcher took a wrecking ball to this country's productive industries. 

There was a time when allowing even one million people to be out of work was seen as unacceptable, but many times that number is par for the course in the neoliberal Thatcherite nightmare. 

The Morning Star also agrees that we should make work pay. The obvious way to do this would seem to be to pay people a decent wage for the work they do.

But this is an anathema to the Tories.

They fought tooth and nail to prevent the introduction of the minimum wage under the last Labour government. 

They have imposed punishing pay "restraint" on public servants since 2010 - meaning real-terms wages have shrunk dramatically, leaving working people thousands of pounds a year worse off. 

And now they seek to impose an effective ban on strike action and want to give the green light to employers to bus in scab labour, making it harder for trade unions to win decent wages for their members.

So if either granting people well-earned pay increases or even allowing them to organise and fight for better pay isn't allowed, making work pay is clearly not the motive for all this welfare "reform."

As Bellows' article in today's paper makes clear "Food deprivation and health decline, deaths and ultimately suicides are not aberrations, but an intrinsic part of a punitive regime which uses sanctions as a weapon in order to force compliance on some groups of people who have come to be seen as a financial burden on society."

Anyone so naive as to think the Conservatives wanted to help disabled people into work got a rude awakening on May 8, when the very first thing the "new" government - ie the old government minus a few sad-eyed liberal stooges - did was to attack access to work funds for the deaf and blind.

This is not about getting people into work. This is about punishing people for having the temerity to require assistance.

It's about reshaping our society to smash the bonds that tie us together and promote the self-centred individualism that lies at the heart of liberal and neoliberal ideology.

The disgraceful and pointless victimisation of a huge swathe of British society is killing people, whether through hunger, suicide or the rise in hate crimes directed at disabled people - a predictable consequence of the Tories' "scrounger" rhetoric.

This grotesque experiment must end now.