The publication of Iain Duncan Smith's Welfare Reform Bill is the most significant piece of legislation brought forward by the coalition.

Yet it rests on a pretence.

A pretence that full employment is not only desirable, but possible: a reality to which the country will return once the coalition's deficit reduction programme has done its job of bringing state finances back under control, and the private sector - freed of the fetters of state control - drives forward the engine of growth.

To this end no meaningful attempt is to be made to bring tax avoidance under control: government's use of the 'services' of people like Lord Browne (higher education) and Sir Ronald Cohen ('big society) - both of whom were of similar use to the previous government, btw - confirms the cynical line of travel.

Cameron's assertion that 'we are all in it together' is less and less heard as the war on 'benefit scroungers' and 'workshy layabouts' goes into overdrive.

The losers are comprehensively those groups already marginal to the 'needs' of the global free markets.

We are now told - since the 'needs' of the private sector demand it - that spending on the unemployed, the disabled, and the frail elderly, is - in every case - unsustainable.

In other words the reduction of the tax burdens on business and top earners is the highest priority, since they are the drivers of growth.

We are not told that in order to maximise the 'drivers of growth' - it is necessary to have a reserve army of the unemployed to keep wage rates low.

Hence the importance of maintaining the pretence that full employment is not only desirable, but possible, when the reverse is the case.

For this reason - enter Lord Browne again - education must be reduced to an adjunct of the training needed to make those entering the labour market useful servants of the drive for profits.

Here, it is important to turn to Anthony Barnett's seminal contribution in openDemocracy on the university fees demos, a masterly overview of the problems faced by those contesting the current dystopia, which perhaps underplays the failure of Keir Hardie's old party to junk neoliberalism, once and for all, and take over the leadership of the fight back.

The evidence is that either Ed Miliband does not understand the imperative to lead this fight, or, perhaps, he and his colleagues lack the insight and imagination to understand the physical and mental destruction which precarity causes its victims, since they lack contact with its consequences.