The stigmatising of people on benefits during the election campaign has been no surprise.
It has effectively been more of the same, after the coalition government spent five years slashing welfare while demonising those who claimed it. While highlighting unrepresentative cases to justify benefit caps and the bedroom tax, George Osborne set the tone early on in the government by talking of shift workers setting off on the commute while looking up at the closed blinds of their neighbour "sleeping off a life on benefits".
The public narrative has become that many benefit claimants are malingerers, scroungers, or cheats - in defiance of the facts.
We know that the Department for Work and Pensions loses more to internal errors than it does to fraud and that any discussion of the size of the benefits bill is distorted by the fact pensions take up half of the department's budget.
This all amounts to a stigmatisation of the poor according to Scotland's Poverty Truth Commission, which has called for an end to the blaming of people for their own situation. Even the term 'hard-working families', beloved of all parties, is discriminatory, they say, implying that those who do not work, for whatever reason are somehow less valuable or important members of society.
Peter Kelly, director of the Poverty Alliance, agrees, saying the phrase forges false divisions between those who work and those who don't, those who do and don't pay taxes. "This type of language only serves to divides society into "them and us", and it is those who are struggling on low incomes that lose out in this kind of debate," he says.
"The phrase hardworking families ignores the fact that for many people work will never be an option but they contribute to society in different ways."
Whoever wins the election, the Poverty Alliance is planning to relaunch the Stick Your Labels anti-stigma campaign next week [May 13] and is asking all politicians to avoid stigmatising the poor.
Meanwhile the Poverty Truth Commission says listening to the voices of our poorest citizens is, rather than blaming or pitying them, is the best way to help them.
"Rarely have we heard from people who actually understand poverty, who know what it means to have to choose between putting money in the gas meter or having breakfast in the morning," organisers said in a statement. "We believe that people experiencing poverty must be at the heart of any strategy designed to overcome it."
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