The Sketch: Poverty reveals itself amidst the rubbish

Tax credits! Yesss! I'm running round the Gallery with my shirt over my head. No other sketch writers are covering this. They are low creatures. Any interest they display in the Housing Benefit "Disregard" is almost wholly feigned. Childcare Partnership Management is quite beyond them. When you ask them how the flexible right to a 13 to 18-week JSA relates to the responsibility of tapering benefits – they are perfectly frank about it.

They simply don't care.

It's essential to keep up with this administrative rubble. You can't approach the essence of modern democracy ("the asset-owning democracy we are creating" as Andrew Smith puts it) without being able to play with this rubbish.

It's a Budget debate on work and pensions. David Willetts selects statistics to show how badly the Government is doing; Mr Smith selects them to show the opposite. For example, Mr Willetts points out that lone parents had been doing well getting back into the workforce until the New Deal for Lone Parents was launched. Gratifyingly, for those of us who enjoy the perverse effects of government action, the number of lone parents dropping out of the workforce increased hugely. Ah, but Mr Smith made a cunning intervention by asking what had happened to the "proportion" (his quote marks) of lone parents out of work? That had gone quite the other way, apparently.

You can believe what you want. The Government jeers at the Tories for their record on debt. Under them, debt hit 44 per cent of GDP; under Mr Brown it is a mere 34 per cent. But, if you take into account £100bn of off-balance-sheet liabilities, little is left to choose between the two.

Nothing at all, in fact.

Occasionally, real information is available, but it has to be salvaged. For instance, Mr Smith said: "Most pensioners pay no income tax." Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It is chilling. How desperately low their incomes must be to pay no income tax? That is by far the best measure of pensioner poverty. The state has pauperised us and expects us to be grateful.

Simoncarr75@hotmail.com