HEARTLESS Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith’s decision to post job advisers in foodbanks is a ploy to blame poor people for their poverty.

The subtext to this stunt is government determination to slur those who frequent foodbanks as work-shy rather than people driven to the end of their tether.

People don’t just turn up at foodbanks to pick up a week’s shopping. They are referred by jobcentres and other agencies.

Duncan Smith is treating foodbanks as though they are, as Scottish nationalist MP Mhairi Black says, an “outpost” of Jobcentre Plus.

Far from being part of the welfare framework, they illustrate stark system failure, indicating that increased numbers of people are falling through holes in the safety net.

According to the Trussell Trust, which plays a major role in providing foodbanks, about half the people seeking their assistance are in work.

We can only speculate on the likely results for low-paid workers and their families if the Tories press ahead with their assault on working tax credits and child tax credits.

It is noteworthy that the Trussell Trust makes clear in its so polite and respectful way that, while it would welcome dialogue with “Iain Duncan Smith or DWP advisers about the feasibility of rolling out this idea,” he has jumped in with his hobnailed boots with no discussion at all.

This confirms his preoccupation with making political capital rather than helping the worst off in society.

No-one will be surprised at that, given his previous “nothing to do with me, guv” explanation that more people attend foodbanks because more are being opened.

Presumably, if they didn’t exist and people couldn’t seek help there, this would prove that there was no need for them.

Duncan Smith’s cold-blooded disdain for those forced to look for assistance to feed their families, either because their wages are too low or their benefits have been sanctioned by his department, is mirrored by his Tory colleagues.

Tory Work and Pensions Minister Lord Freud, a former City investment banker and adviser on welfare “reform” to New Labour, claimed that it is difficult to understand the rise in foodbanks over the past 11 years, admitting that it was “very hard to know why people go to them.”

Chief whip Michael Gove said that people who use foodbanks have their own “decisions” to blame — they have presumably decided to be poor.

Former Tory Party chairman Lord Tebbit — once summed up accurately by Labour’s Michael Foot as a “semi-trained polecat” — sneered without a smidgeon of evidence that people prefer to pick up basic foodstuffs free at foodbanks so they can spend their money on junk food.

None of these vile politicians accept any responsibility for poverty levels exacerbated by the government’s role in slashing benefits or sanctioning claimants.

Duncan Smith denies any link between the unfair sanctioning of some claimants, leaving them destitute and desperate, and their suicide deaths.

As far as the minister is concerned, people take their own lives for a variety of reasons and, besides, he didn’t make political capital when similar tragedies happened under New Labour, so get over it.

Such complacency speaks volumes for the Tories’ disregard for millions of citizens suffering as a result of the government’s divisive policies.

Rather than accepting that foodbanks are a fact of modern life, Duncan Smith and his government colleagues should act in a more humane way by ending sanctions against claimants and scrapping their cruel plans to phase out in-work benefits.