You can’t help feeling we are on an inexorably depressing race to the bottom. A highway to hell. Or possibly heaven for the more perverse. A mission to make people’s lives as miserable as possible. To believe the worst of everyone. All under the guise of national redemption. A country fit for the 21st century.

We live in confusing times. There was a time when it was easy to spot clear blue water between the main political parties. Increasingly, though, you’d be hard pushed to differentiate between Labour, the Conservatives and Reform. Especially when it comes to matters of welfare and social justice. Some Labour backbenchers must be wondering what the hell is going on, given the things they are now expected to justify. Their consciences are frazzled. Is this really what they entered parliament for?

Time was when a Labour government could be relied on to give the benefit of the doubt to the poorest and most needy members of society. It’s the ticket on which they were elected. Only not so much these days. Now that things have temporarily quietened down on the Trump-Ukraine-Russia front, Keir Starmer has been drip feeding the media with his planned cuts to disability and out-of-work benefits.

And it’s not good news if you rely on state support to get by. Because the presumption of innocence is changing. The assumption is now that you’re a slacker trying to cheat the system. Someone wangling to get the state to pay for their Netflix subscription because of some hyper-woke imaginary complaint that prevents them from being arsed to leave the house to go to work. Better that 700,000 disabled people are pushed into poverty than one scrounger gets away with a life of free-rolling. It’s God’s work. What Jesus would have wanted.

And don’t give us all that long Covid bullshit. We all know that you’re just terminally lazy. Tough choices for tough times. So it’s time for people to get on their hands and knees and crawl if necessary to do the jobs that no one in the cabinet would dream of doing for a second. All to neutralise the siren voices of those on the far right. Redemption is a very last-year ideal for Starmer.

The only excuse Labour is offering is sophisticated dialectics. Only Labour can be trusted to slash the welfare bill because they are the party for whom it raises a few moral qualms. Though not nearly enough. No wonder, then, many on benefits are looking back on the last Tory government with affection. They may have talked a tough game but they never got round to radically changing anything. Too lazy themselves.

Much the same could be said of the justice system. On Tuesday morning, the Commons was more than half full for justice departmental questions. And you would have been hard pushed to find a single MP who wasn’t keen to bang someone up for some crime or other. Thought crimes would do these days. In fact, they are probably the worst. Deserving of a full-life tariff at the minimum.

The justice secretary and lord chancellor, Shabana Mahmood, captured the zeitgeist. “We need to make sure that we never run out of prison places,” she said. “You have my word that there will always be a prison place for everyone.”

There we had it. She wouldn’t rest until the entire population of the United Kingdom had been sent down. Never mind the pretext. Only once everyone was in prison could we be sure the country was properly safe. The only flaw in her argument was that she couldn’t say who would be left to maintain the prisons. Or what she would find herself inside for.

But MPs on all sides of the house were prepared to overlook this flaw in Mahmood’s logic. She had spoken a Higher Truth. That we were a Fallen People in need of incarceration. Throw away the key. There was no sentence that could not be commuted to capital punishment. Lee Anderson looked up. He was very much hoping that his former Reform colleague, Rupert Lowe, would be looking at the inside of a prison cell. With no chance of remission. Hell hath no fury …

All of which was somewhat problematic for shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick. There is nothing more that Honest Bob would like to do than create trouble for Labour but he has almost no wriggle room. Because every time he comes up with an idea he finds that Mahmood is already on the same page.

They are in the death spiral of the compassionless. A race to see if the other also has no soul. This might explain why Honest Bob appears to have developed a nervous twitch. Though that might be a side-effect of the Ozempic. Soon there will be nothing left of him but negative space.

First off Honest Bob wanted to know why so many prisoners who were released early had gone missing. “Aha!” said Mahmood. She too was appalled. It was all down to the tagging contract with Serco that the Tories had agreed. She was on a mission to round everyone up. Including Serco. And the Tory ministers who had signed the deal.

Jenrick looked distraught and sat down disconsolate. This is his one chance to parade his leadership credentials to the Tories and his Labour opposite number was consistently ahead of him. Hell, he was meant to be the modern face of the Nasty party. Being marginally brighter than Kemi wasn’t really cutting it.

Things didn’t improve when we got to the main action. The new guidelines of the sentencing council. Honest Bob thought he had got ahead of the game by rubbishing them as two-tier justice. Unfair to white men. Only to find that Mahmood had got there first. She and Jenrick chose to ignore the fact that both Labour and the Tories had been happy to agree the new guidance only months ago.

That was then. This was now. The public wanted a scapegoat and Labour was happy to give them one. The idea that black people might have been given longer sentences than white people under the existing guidelines never crossed Mahmood or Jenrick’s mind. Performance politics was the order of the day.

It was all contagious. Junior justice minister Nic Dakin used to be a sweetheart. A liberal through and through. Now he is forced to adopt the persona of a rabid attack dog. He looks miserable. “Lock everyone up,” he yelled, his crazed eyes rotating manically. To wild applause. Mahmood then declared there were two prison wings in the UK that were drug free. Take me to them. Please. I don’t want any of the Kool Aid on which the Commons is overdosing.