FOOTBALL pundit Gary Neville tore into Tory ideology today during a televised debate ahead of the government’s “brutal” £20 cut to universal credit payments.

The former England and Manchester United defender appeared on ITV’s breakfast show Good Morning Britain alongside former Thatcherite MP Edwina Currie in the morning.

Currie told hosts Susanna Reid and Tony Blair’s former spindoctor Alastair Campbell that there were “record numbers of job vacancies” in the country and that employers “from catering to the care industry, food processing” were in need of workers.

“Businesses are actually desperate and pushing up wages,” Currie claimed. “And so it doesn’t make any kind of sense for us to pay people to stay home. What we really want is for people to get out there and get the jobs.”

Neville offered to translate what the former MP for South Derbyshire, and mistress to former prime minister John Major, was actually saying.

“It’s a message Conservative MPs have been entrenching in our minds for a long time,” Neville said.

“The first thing that Edwina said was ‘I’m OK here, we’re OK here,’ which is the first thing a Conservative person and MP does, they look after themselves.

“The next thing she said was, ‘Go and get a job. Get back to work you lazy sods. Get off your backsides, stop watching Good Morning Britain and other television programmes and go and get a job.’

“It’s the way in which this sort of language appears from Conservative ministers for so long. You know: ‘Immigrants are all taking our jobs. Homeless people are all beggars on the streets.”They’re basically alienating the people.

“I trust the population of this country. I work on the theory that people at home aren’t sitting there lazy. They really want a good job. They really want good pay. They really want their mental health to be sorted.

“They’re not there sitting and thinking ‘I’m going to take the Chancellor’s money and live off nothing and live off their money for the next 10 or 15 years and do nothing.’

“To me the language is always divisive, it’s not helpful. It’s something that we’ve seen for over 10 years, and to be fair, previous Tory governments.

“It’s really dangerous, we’re one team in this country, we’re one group of people.

“Honestly, to remove universal credit payments at this moment in time is brutal. Let’s be clear, it is brutal.”

Over 5.8 million people are thought to be universal credit claimants, and almost 40 per cent of them are already in full-time work.

According to analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Boris Johnson’s government’s cuts to universal credit could put about 500,000 people into poverty, including 200,000 children.