THIS week the United Kingdom has sunk even further into the cruel, compassionless, chaotic confusion that the Government calls conservatism. Over the weekend there were calls from the House of Commons Work and Pension committee to scrap the triple lock on state pensions. So if you’re an older person who voted No in 2014 because you thought that your pension was only going to be safe if Scotland remained a part of the UK, you were sadly mistaken.

The Tories are looking for ways to ensure that the UK state pension, already one of the worst in Europe, becomes one of the worst in the developed world. The Conservatives are taking an axe to state social security provision and the elderly aren’t going to escape either.

It doesn’t matter if you lived through the Second World War. It doesn’t matter if you did your National Service getting shot at in the jungles of Malaya or on the banks of the Suez Canal, you can have a poppy instead of a pension. There’s respect for you.

Having bribed us last week with the news that some of the ships promised by the MoD would actually be built on the Clyde after all, although not as many as originally promised, another of Better Together’s promises collapsed like a UK benefits payment. Eight defence sites in Scotland are due to close despite Scotland being assured that the only way defence jobs in Scotland could be safe was for us to vote No to independence. The scale and extent of the closures is far greater than anyone had forecast, and it’s clear now that last week’s announcement about the ships on the Clyde was an attempt to sweeten the bitter pill of Brexit. The MoD giveth, and the MoD taketh away. That’s us feeling safer and more secure in the United Kingdom.

Then on Monday the new benefits cap came into effect, stripping income from some of the poorest families in the country and increasing the risk that they go hungry, lose their homes, or sink further into debt and despair. Irrespective of the size of your family, how many mouths you have to feed, or whether you live in a high-rent area, outside of London the total amount your family will be allowed to receive in a year will be capped at £20,000. When you’re already struggling to make ends meet, all the own-brand baked beans in the world aren’t going to make up a further shortfall of £70 a week in your income. That’s the amount that the likes of Iain Duncan Smith can cheerfully spend on lunch. If you voted No in 2014 because you were hopeful that the Labour Party would protect you from the excesses of Tory contempt, think again. As 184 Labour MPs didn’t vote against the benefits cap, including Red Morningside’s Ian Murray.

The social security net is shredded and frayed. This latest measure threatens to destroy what’s left. We’ve already got a system where random cruelty counts as an incentive to employment.

The benefits cap encourages people into work in the exact same way that sticking a petrol bomb through the letterbox of a slum landlord’s property encourages people to seek better quality housing. There’s a fine line between a disincentive and degradation, and the UK is miles across it. But never mind, you can always Call Kaye on Radio Scotland and say how bad the SNP is.

Also on Monday, the United Nations published a report showing people with disabilities are seeing their human rights violated by a UK Government which is slashing support. People with terminal illnesses are being assessed as fit for work, people with chronic degenerative conditions or congenital disorders are having to prove their health hasn’t improved.

If you’ve got terminal cancer, in the UK you can still be assessed as workshy. The UN report concludes: “There is reliable evidence that the threshold of grave or systematic violations of the rights of persons with disabilities has been met.”

And as the very poorest families in the country wake up to the realisation that they face a greater chance of homelessness, that they’re going to struggle to feed their kids, and as people with disabilities bear the burden of austerity, another pensioner on benefits is getting a pay rise of £2.8 million a year. Under the Sovereign Grant Act of 2011, the amount that the Queen receives from the state every year can never be less in cash terms than the amount she received the previous year. So that’s OK then. Never mind that people are starving and if you’re poor the Government will strip you of your dignity along with your income, we’ve got poppies and a well-fed monarch.

Meanwhile over in India, Theresa May is hoping to make a good impression on Narendra Modi, the only Prime Minister in the democratic world who’s possibly more of a xenophobe than she is.

In the post Brexit world it’s vital for the UK to strike trade deals with growing economies like India, only India has already signalled that in return it will seek a loosening of the strict visa requirements that the UK imposes on Indian citizens. Britain has agreed to a bespoke deal, a phrase we’ve been hearing a lot of late, for Indian businesspeople and their families which will smooth their path through UK immigration.

So there’s going to be less immigration from Europe but more from India. How’s that getting out of the EU so we can crack down on immigration looking for you Theresa? The closet racists of Ukip will be thrilled.

The Tories say that the Brexit vote was all about cracking down on immigration, and they’re doing all they can to reduce immigration by turning the UK into a cold, harsh, unwelcoming country. The Conservatives are destroying all the good parts of Britain that attract people to come here. It’s the only thing they’re succeeding in. And what we know now is that paradoxically, if we seek to preserve the good parts of Britain, the positive and progressive achievements of the British state, we’re going to have to seek independence in order to do so.