BEFORE Margaret Thatcher’s death intervened, one political row was drowning out all others – that increasingly nasty battle over benefits. Gleeful Conservatives were confident they had put Labour on the back foot over its alleged reluctance to get tough with “scroungers” and our “something- for-nothing culture”.

And George Osborne had skilfully/disgracefully used the tragic killing of six Derby children in a house fire to make the Tory case for stripping benefits from large families.

Welfare wars will rage again all-too soon, which is why a study by two North-East academics – explaining why such bust-ups miss their mark badly – is so interesting.

Unlike tabloid editors and Chancellors, these two Teesside professors deal in hard evidence and their findings should make all politicians sit up and think.

The starting point is the divide between hard-working “strivers” and layabout “shirkers”

– a split that Robert MacDonald and Tracy Shildrick found simply doesn’t exist.

Instead, interviewing 60 white, workingclass Middlesbrough men and women, aged 30 to 60, they discovered what the pair called the “low-pay, no-pay cycle”.

These are people trapped between bouts of unemployment and periods in jobs that are low-paid, require few qualifications and are desperately insecure. They might be care assistants, security guards, bar staff, labourers, cleaners or shop workers – but they talked enthusiastically of the attractions of work.

Most found themselves out of work because of redundancy, or because temporary contracts came to an end, rather than because they quit.

Then it took time for a new benefit claim to be processed. Having earned little in work, a high-interest, doorstep loan was needed simply to pay the rent and the debt cycle turned.

Even so, some refused to claim benefits at all and did not register as jobless, either because of the “shame” or the sheer inefficiencies of the system.

The professors’ conclusion is that the politician’s cliche – since Tony Blair – that “work is the best route out of poverty” is no longer enough.

Instead, they wrote: “Our participants seemed to be caught on a “waterwheel” that dipped them under the poverty line before lifting them above it, before the wheel turned again – forever churning between low-paid jobs and even lower benefit payments.

“Pointing to who might be a “shirker” and who might be a “striver”, ignores the insecurity of much contemporary employment.

The striver one day may well be so-called the shirker the next.”

Nobody disputes that a minority won’t work – and no party is opposed to stripping benefits from those people, if they refuse jobs. But in stirring up anger about that minority, politicians conveniently duck the issue that really matters – the terrible cost of failing to create jobs that provide security and prosperity.

ALEX CUNNINGHAM, the Stockton North MP, has led protests that Michael Gove has a cunning way of avoiding scrutiny by refusing to answer parliamentary questions. The Labour MP wrote to the Commons procedures committee to point out that replies frequently come back promising a proper answer “as soon as possible”. Now the committee has asked the Education Secretary to explain his “exceptionally poor performance”.