“Everywhere, welfare authorities were calling in the unemployed for questioning and examination as to whether they were fit for work, those who were deemed fit were drafted into……schemes of one kind or another; those who failed to appear were taken off the register, and their payments stopped. Rent supplements were cut, payments to carers for the old and sick for medication were slashed. A working-class woman who asked the welfare officer for help in paying for her 75-year-old mother, whom she cared for at home, was told that the state would no longer pay for such people, who were nothing but a burden on the national community’’.