As the last welfare claimant is sanctioned, the statistics show a jobless figure of zero. Unemployment has been eliminated. The word has been consigned to the virtual heritage cabinet, along with the old ‘job for life’. Meanwhile full employment, for so long an impossible dream buried in some bureaucrat’s drawer, has suddenly become a bright, market-led reality. The news channels are in full flow, business leaders and their political allies are triumphant. This is the surest sign yet of the economic resurrection, a victory for hard-working families doing the right thing and a validation of the moral toolkits of the employability coaches, a turnaround in the national mindset and a huge winning stride forward in the global race.

Viewers watch this scrolling fiction with a weary indifference as they scour the job sites, clicking from one assignment to another, searching for another few hours, bidding for scraps of work tomorrow or next week, often for no more money than so-called welfare would provide. It has long been known that a benefit claim is a conscription to Poundland. The figures have been massaged out of existence by the invisible hand and its twin pressures of stigma and fragmentary labour. The duties are the same, the rewards and prospects equally non-existent: it comes down to a choice between one arbitrary authority and another.