Charlotte Gore’s piece on 15 October is being widely quoted. Rightly.

Because with unerring precision she drills down deep into the moral darkness of welfare policy as currently practised:

Think about how people feel! Think about all the things they could do with that money, or that job, or learn from those people or achieve with the support of those others! Don’t you understand? Have you no feelings?

Apparently not. I just keep thinking, “But it’s not your money. How can you live with yourselves taking it?”

Then I wonder how we got into the sort of situation where people feel they have to take the money, that their need is moral justification enough. Is our economy really so pathetic and broken that people are reduced to state sponsored beggary?

What is so striking about visiting Poland is that you go into a shop and cheerful, trim young Poles are working there. You hardly ever see people of any age who are slobbishly, blobbishly slovenly and over-weight.

Why? Because there is a hugely reduced welfare state. The absolute sum of money you might get from the state for not working is small. So almost everyone works. Even people claiming the dole try to work on the side. That keeps Polish society moving and in good psychological shape.

Go into a shop here and you are quite likely also to see trim young Poles working there, and unemployed Brits of all ages in cheap sports clothes and hoodies milling around outside with blank yet sullen eyes.

This is an insane situation.

What is truly baffling is the way in which the middle-class Guardianistas and massed BBC chatterers somehow genuinely to believe that by ‘supporting’ unemployed young people by taking money from taxpayers such as Charlotte and myself and unborn children, they are doing those unemployed young people some sort of favour.

It’s exactly the opposite. State handouts undermine the core of our very integrity, namely self-reliance and self-worth.

If you choose to mope around living off the energy of others, something profound in your spirit is broken. You have no respect for yourself. And you have no respect even for the others who pay into the system: you know they are not doing so because they are feeling altruistic, but rather because they are forced to do so by the state on pain of imprisonment if they refuse.

The ghastly fact facing the Western world is that it is now blindingly obvious that it is madness to carry on pretending that wealth just appears as if by magic, and that all the state has to do is busily redistribute it. But having created this welfare and spiritual dysfunctionality on so absolutely massive a scale, we find that rowing it back is really difficult.

The problem is not that the British Government are being evil and callous in proposing all these largely non-cuts. It is that they are making only a feeble and tentative moral case for personal self-esteem as the core of the policy effort.

Why? Probably because they can’t face the shrill squealing – amplified to intolerable levels by the media and Euro-freeloaders – which they’ll face from all those people who have lost their self-respect but think they haven’t, and whose lumpen feelings are, yes, hurt when the government says Enough.

If you can face thinking about all this in a less depressed way, check out this iBall TV video clip kindly sent in by a reader.

But this week all roads lead back to Charlotte Gore:

I just keep thinking, “But it’s not your money. How can you live with yourselves taking it?”

Answers … come there none.