As you might have heard, a general election campaign is upon us.

Suddenly political parties are overflowing with shiny new ideas and exciting promises. Whether they mean a word is, as ever, another matter, but from now until the first Thursday in May they will be bending your ear regardless.

Given that a hung parliament remains a strong possibility, most of this will be chaff in the wind before long. If honest, David Cameron, Ed Miliband and the rest should be telling us about the things they would like to do if allowed into government. Instead, improbably, they talk about what they will do when, not if, they win. Then they treat us to policies they think voters want to hear.

Last week, the Tories decided that withdrawing benefits from addicts and the obese who refuse treatment would go down well. Yesterday, the Prime Minister pandered a little more by "announcing" that 18-to-21 year olds who fail to enter employment or training will be stripped of the Jobseeker's allowance and forced into community work.

It's a curious strategy, even by the standards of a party wedded to the myth that there exists a parasitic mass of people whose only ambition is "a life on benefits". The real problem with the young unemployed is simple: there are too many of them. In fact, their numbers increased in the last quarter of 2014 when joblessness generally was falling. For this cohort, it's straightforward: not enough jobs.

Between September and November last year, 764,000 18-to-24 year olds were out of work. Though down on the previous November's figure, this was a 30,000 increase on the preceding quarter. It pushed unemployment for the age group up from 16 per cent to 16.9 per cent. In the same period, general unemployment fell by 58,000 to 5.8 per cent.

Yesterday, Mr Cameron, restricting his targets to 18-to-21 year olds, nevertheless said that he aims "effectively to abolish long-term youth unemployment". A free pinch of salt ought to be available with that statement. For one thing, the Prime Minister has in his sights just 50,000 young people. For another, he reckons that these individuals - around 10 per cent of the jobless total in their age range - are most at risk of following "that well-worn path from the school gate, down to the Job Centre, and on to a life on benefits".

For many Tories, the idea is almost an article of faith. George Osborne, the Chancellor, is fond of denouncing the scrounging neighbour in his kip while honest folk drag themselves to work. The idea is outrageous to many, and therefore - so the calculation runs - worth a few votes. It just happens to be untrue.

First, 99.3 per cent of those claiming any sort of benefit are doing so honestly, at least according to Iain Duncan Smith's Department of Work and Pensions. Fraud, scrounging, call it as you will, accounts for 0.7 per cent. Secondly, according to the Scottish Government, 59 per cent of children in poverty are living in households in which at least one person works. In Scotland alone that's 110,000 children in working families dependent on benefits. This is no "lifestyle choice".

So what about those households in which no one has worked for generations? That's a well-known phenomenon, surely, one documented endlessly by newspapers which tend to recommend a vote for the Conservatives. Well-known, perhaps, but remarkably difficult to demonstrate.

In 2012, in fact, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation made a specific effort to find families rife with fecklessness. Of the famous "three-generations-and-never-worked" it found not a single example. Of two generations of the work-shy in one family, it arrived at a figure of under 1 per cent. In a country of 26.4 million households, fewer than 15,000 were dedicated to Mr Cameron's "life on benefits".

Still, who'll be trading such figures when the Westminster parties are competing to be tough on those who need support? Perhaps Mr Cameron is right when he identifies an appetite for punitive sanctions among the working public. In the Tory playbook, those never fail, not least because most people have fantastically wrong-headed ideas about levels of fraud, or what benefits are actually worth.

A few might stop to wonder, nevertheless, why the Prime Minister has promised to set just 50,000 of the young unemployed on the straight and narrow. What about jobs for the other 450,000 in the 18-to-21 age group? And if - a big if - 50,000 are to be conscripted into community work, what will that do to employment among real carers? People who have chosen to do a job might be more useful than a bunch of bullied youngsters.

It's election time. The salt cellar will have to be refilled before we are done. At these moments politicians say all sorts of things for the sake of a few headlines. With his promised drive against the obese and the addicted Mr Cameron embodies the nanny state Tories are supposed to abhor. His community work gimmick does nothing to solve youth unemployment, or instil the self-reliance Tories are supposed to venerate. He doesn't care. This is stunt politics.

Students of such things might wonder, though, what became of David Cameron the "compassionate Conservative". Ironically enough, he is retreating into blood-and-guts populism just as his favourite old fad is enjoying something of a revival.

In America, figures as implausible as Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush have decided that the best way to get to the White House these days is to talk about income inequality, poverty, and "opportunity for all". In Britain, the likes of Tim Montgomorie, journalist, think-tanker and former aide to Mr Duncan Smith, is busy promoting compassion under the rubric - website and book-in-the-making - The Good Right.

Mr Montgomerie is influential in his circles. If he says true Conservatism is more than materialism, individualism and a dose of law and order, he will find dutiful echoes. Besides, Tories haven't said anything nice about the poor in ages. So The Good Right assures right-wingers, daringly, that "government is not the enemy". It even risks saying that "A provision of a generous minimum for those who can't help themselves is a test of decency".

Whether that counts as a revelation is a matter of taste. Whether the word generous sits easily with Mr Osborne or Mr Duncan Smith, meanwhile, is a game for all the family. What seems obvious is that those gentlemen have gone a bit far for some soft Tories in their pursuit of the poor. The spectacle of the nasty party, as Theresa May once described her colleagues, has begun to seem counter-productive once again.

So will Mr Cameron alter course and stop talking nonsense about benefits claimants? Not with Ukip on his tail he won't, and not while Mr Osborne is determined to shrink the state no matter the consequences. There is another problem, in any case, for anyone trying to persuade the Prime Minister towards the narrow path of decency and compassion.

As a body, his party doesn't believe in that sort of thing. Voters, for or against, don't believe Tories believe it. So it will be business as usual, as ever, until 7 May.