The Tories want to cut £23 billion from social security. Well, I've seen this story before. In 2015, they went into the election promising to cut £12 billion. I was at the DWP. I wanted to see Ed Miliband and Labour win. And I was horrified at the thought of what £12 billion in cuts would mean. Food bank use had already skyrocketed to 1 million food parcels a year. You know the next bit, the Conservatives won. I was devastated knowing what I would to do at work the next day. Trying to find the best out of a set of horrific options. But here was the thing. They couldn’t do the cuts. They couldn’t pass cuts that looked remotely reasonable. Osborne proposed large cuts to *working* parents in his summer 2015 budget. He then had to tear it up and try and sneak some in later. I was in HMT when Iain Duncan Smith (!) resigned over social security expenditure cuts. The real lesson is this: it’s easy for the Conservatives to talk about very large cuts to social security expenditure. But they can’t deliver them in practice because their ideology won’t deliver affordable lives for hardworking people. All pain, no gain.