WHEN hamburger chains use the phrase "for illustrative purposes only", they’re asking us to forgive their lies.

Those four words tell us the picture we’re seeing bears practically no resemblance to reality – from bitter experience we know illustrative purposes are usually a smokescreen for a tasteless, almost inhumane experience.

By leaving those four little words out, Iain Duncan Smith’s dark cabal of propaganda puppets recently sold the world a JuicyKingBigMacXXXL version of welfare sanctioning without apology.

In a stunning attempt at Orwellian double-think, the Tories invented people to cheerlead their poverty-inducing policies, publishing case studies of imaginary benefits claimants thanking their overlords for teaching them the error of their ways.

Zac and Sarah grinned from leaflets produced by Mr Duncan Smith's Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), sold as sickness benefit claimants who had been sanctioned or threatened with benefit removal.

The imaginary pair were full of thanks, grateful martyrs selfless enough to give up their meagre incomes in pursuit of jobseeking perfection.

Zac and Sarah-style sanctioning offers down-on-their-luck people the chance to rise from the ranks of the shirkers so that they emerge triumphantly clutching the perfect CV, ideal for batting off the inevitable onslaught of zero-hour "opportunities".

In Zac and Sarah, our government disguised the tasteless, inhumane experience of sanctioning as helpful, even benevolent.

But Zac and Sarah didn't exist. The DWP had made them up. The department's spin-doctors were quick to say they had been used for illustrative purposes only, but the reality – the £7.50 service station hamburger version of reality – is one so sickening that nothing could adequately illustrate it.

As has been proven time and time again, the poorest in our society are constantly punished, pushed to their absolute limits by unending austerity measures. Sanctioning – through which the DWP will cut or withhold a range of benefits for a variety of slights – is another way of ensuring those who fall on bad times must jump through as many hoops as humanly possible to access the safety net Britain was once so proud of – and god forbid you stumble as you jump.

Imaginary case study Sarah was sanctioned after failing to produce a CV without good reason. In reality, multitudes of people have been sanctioned for reasons aptly described as "cruel, arbitrary and ridiculous".

Examples include a veteran sanctioned for selling poppies, claimants sanctioned for missing Job Centre appointments for job interviews, and an individual sanctioned for not completing an assessment after suffering a heart attack during that assessment.

It’s no exaggeration to say people in the UK are dying because of benefits sanctioning.

Sanctioned for not taking the search for work seriously, diabetes sufferer David Clapson died surrounded by CVs, with £3.44 to his name and a completely empty stomach.

In May this year, the DWP admitted that one in five known benefit-related deaths had been related to sanctions – this approach to monitoring welfare is actually killing people.

Already struggling, people are stripped of their money for arbitrary lengths of time and left unable to pay bills, to support families, to eat.

The DWP’s lies and flippancy is an outright insult to Britain’s most vulnerable people, to the memories of those lost to austerity measures so severe they’re practically murderous.