WHEN Tories set about social security, you can expect black comedy.

They can't help themselves. Should the way they live their lives ever be questioned, the sky will fall in. For them, nature's law is this: misfortune is a conspiracy against the fortunate. They really think that way. They really believe that no-one needs to be poor, jobless, or otherwise a blot upon their happy vistas. The trickier aspects of the human condition - disability, disease, trauma, the usual effects of capitalism - can then be talked around. Whatever it is, it's your fault.

Personal responsibility is a founding idea for Tories. A person who takes control of his or her life is certain, by definition, to be OK. A person who fails to get a grip has suffered a failure of will and character. If only bootstraps could be pulled a little harder, cloth cut a little closer, and wasters disciplined, all would be well. The unsightly poor would disappear.

Tories are individualists, protective of individual liberties, suspicious of any idea that - but I claim no copyright - we're all in this together. Ask them how much of David Cameron's £30 million fortune was actually made by David Cameron, on an hourly rate, and they will call you ignorant of the perfect mechanisms of a market economy. They will clip you (metaphorically) around the ear.

Iain Duncan Smith likes to boast about his experience of the dole. That was somewhere within his state-subsidised career as a soldier, his time as an arms dealer, his brief spell as a glorified estate agent and his meteoric descent as a politician. Having conquered adversity by selling his talents as an after-dinner speaker, IDS rubs along in a big house on the estate of his father-in-law, Baron Cottesloe. So why can't everyone do the same?

Perhaps because the world is more complicated than the Minister for Work and Pensions would like. Sometimes it is more complex than he is prepared to recognise. When the National Audit Office reports that his pet scheme for universal credit has been an expensive fiasco, IDS runs through excuses like a shifty extra from Only Fools And Horses.

It was those computers, see? No, hold on, it was the civil servants: couldn't run a menage. Guv, it was probably claimants with their complicated lives and their feckless refusal to take up after-dinner speaking. Taking responsibility, like a proper Conservative, IDS has managed to blame everyone but the boss for the outrageous "reform" debacle. Take a stab at guessing who the boss might be.

IDS considers himself a moral sort of man. He doesn't have a view that is not "deeply-held". When he talks of the reasons why an individual might need the state's support he behaves as though offended. He is never upset, however, by the possibility that the plight of millions might just be the consequence of a serf economy. Instead, he blames the serfs, those losers.

One result is that IDS does not pause to think the unthinkable. This is supposed to be a Tory speciality, but it is set aside when careers are at stake. Yet even on a small-scale, 1000-client trial basis in the north of England, universal credit isn't working. Frank Field, Labour's guru in these matters, thinks it can never work. Those who will have to clear up the mess, in the housing charities and the poverty campaigns, dread what will follow if IDS doesn't see reason.

So let's give him a clue. Could it be that universal credit is a stupid idea? Forget that it "enjoys cross-party support" from Labour's useful idiots. Forget that it appeals to the inner bureaucrat in every politician, and to the real bureaucrats who get to play with computers. Misfortune and need come in many forms. Every life is different. So why design a system of social security destined to cause chaos by denying complexity?

How wrong does IDS need to be before Cameron hands out the black spot? The National Audit Office has reported in language ripe with contempt. The civil servants are throwing money at the problem of the minister's reputation. The United Nations has its special rapporteur on housing, Raquel Rolnik, touring Britain's cities to investigate the claim that the bedroom tax is an abuse of human rights. This is third world stuff.

In Glasgow, according to the Office for National Statistics, 30.2% of homes are workless. Voting Labour for decades has not exactly paid off. More to the point, the figure was up in 2012 - from 28.7% the year before - and the greatest number were out of a job because of sickness or disability. This is despite the best efforts of IDS and his hirelings to reclassify illness as a person failure.

The minister is always first in the queue to volunteer budget cuts when George Osborne comes calling. This tells us, first, that IDS is contemptuous of the notion that personal need is best answered with money. That's a large claim from someone living well on his father-in-law's agreeable spread.

Secondly, it reminds us that here is a politician charged with a country's welfare whose policies create the impression that all claimants are, in technical language, at it. In other words, their need is not real. So he presides over a system wholly at odds with reality. But damnable reality persists.

He must have seen that Glasgow statistic. Having done his well-publicised "research" in the city while in opposition, he must know that cutting budets year upon year is, at best, beside the point, not least when your vaunted reforms make matters worse, not better. Now universal credit is "postponed". What happens to the needy in the meantime?

Tories such as IDS these days talk of welfare rather than social security. The language is significant. For them, a human right - and housing is certainly one - amounts to a handout. They forget all of those who paid plenty before they claimed. They forget that their experiments in economic theory have pushed many into the need for which social security was created. Most of all, they forget the nature of humanity.

Why on earth would disability and housing occupy the same administrative box? Who seriously believes that there is any "universal" answer to the unique problems of a single life? If IDS doesn't understand, he should. If he does understand and chooses to ignore the truth, you can draw your conclusions.

Conservatism takes a philosophical view of the individual as he or she stands in a society. There follows an idea of what society means, if it is accepted that such a thing as society exists. Thatcher - and let's not rewrite history - took the easy way out. But the Tory idea of personal liberty never once embraces the belief that there must be freedom from need.

Scotland could do better. Then again, we could hardly do worse if we chose to take proper responsibility for our people. Yet even if we reject the chance of independence, the feral cult of IDS and his kind will have to be challenged.

So return to first principles. The Tory idea that the unlucky can be hosed from the streets doesn't work. It's a waste of time and money. It disputes reality. We are, after all, in this together.