TORY Tracey Crouch was branded “out of touch” yesterday after telling families who face losing tax credits to just “go without.”

The Sports Minister said some families are in financial trouble because they fecklessly spend cash on luxuries like TV subscriptions.

Ms Crouch (right) attempted to play down the growing Tory rebellion over the cuts in an interview with the right-wing Spectator magazine, but inadvertently sparked a fresh controversy.

The Chatham MP said: “I think at the end of the day one of the kindest things that we can do is try to help people to support themselves and work around their finances.

“Some of my most heartbreaking cases are those that come to me saying that they are struggling and then you go through with them their expenditure and income — I’m not generalising at all, I’m talking about some very individual cases — and actually they just haven’t realised some of the savings that they need to make themselves.

“You know it can be things like paid subscriptions to TVs and you just sit there and you think ‘you have to sometimes go without if you are going to have people make ends meet’.”

Tory MP and former chancellor Ken Clarke also fanned the flames under the feet of Chancellor George Osborne by describing tax credits as a “bung.”

“It is a stupid name, tax credits,” he told the Guardian. “It is just a taxpayers’ bung on top of their pay.”

Shadow Treasury minister Rebecca Long-Bailey said the comments were “yet more evidence of out-of-touch Tory MPs insulting working people.”

Responding to Ms Crouch, the Salford MP said: “It’s outrageous for a serving minister to claim that working families simply need to ‘go without’ in order to make ends meet.

“Losing £1,300 a year isn’t about cutting back on luxuries,

it’s about families being able to pay the bills.”

And hitting back at Mr Clarke, she said: “What a bung really looks like is a Tory Party funded by rich bankers and hedge funds giving tax breaks to a few millionaires while cutting tax credits to over three million working families.”