Macho talk of 10-year sentences for benefit cheats is the latest example in a long list of hypocritical and dangerous utterings.

People who illegally exploit the social security system for greed should certainly be sought out and prosecuted. Until tax-dodgers are sentenced to a decade behind bars, however, the Crown Prosecution Service call rings hollow.

For despite the volume emitted from Conservatives on welfare fraud the fact remains that the problem pales into significance next to the bigger losses to all of us racked up by tax cheats.

The government and most of the media seem obsessed with singling out a few bad apples or extreme examples in order to smear the entire social security system.

To confuse matters the government has purposely included mistakes in payments in the "fraud" figure, falsely inflating it to £5 billion.

Little wonder that in surveys the public often wildly overestimates the level of actual benefits fraud, which is around £1bn out of a total £174bn Work and Pensions budget.

A sizeable figure, but small fry compared to the far more pressing issue of tax-dodging.

Civil Service union PCS has for years been highlighting the impact of both benefit office and Inland Revenue staff cuts on the ability of these wings of government to keep on top of things.

And the stakes are huge - PCS estimates that around £70bn is snatched from our pockets by super-greedy business types who are part of the real entitlement culture in this country.

That's on top of the billions in housing benefit poured into the pockets of banks and private landlords instead of being channelled into new low-rent housing to meet demand.

Where's the macho posturing on these issues? Nowhere to be seen.

And in a week when the Tories have faced growing pressure - even from the United Nations - over their cruel and deadly bedroom tax, and mounting criticism over the universal credits calamity that's about to descend on millions of people and plunge them deeper into chaos, be on the lookout out for the unwelcome return of the "scroungers" message.

But if the most recent "attitudes" survey is anything to go by the right is losing the battle.

Last week the annual British Social Attitudes Report showed a 10-point fall between 2011-12 in the number of people expressing a negative view on benefits.

The fact is that in austerity Britain more and more people know someone forced to rely on social security.

Thanks to the work of campaign groups such as UK Uncut they're also increasingly aware of the massive issue of tax-dodging by corporates.

It's time for the phoney war on welfare to end and the battle on big business crooks to begin in earnest.

Cut-cost rail

First "Crapital" Connect, as it's less than affectionately known by its long-suffering passengers, was rightly fined for trapping a bunch of them for more than three hours in a north London tunnel.

But the failing doesn't just represent another shoddy episode in the loony right's experiment with rail privatisation.

It also highlights the impact of cuts to staff and resources that mean there was no locomotive on hand to move the train when it failed.

And there was no guard on hand to look after the passengers - prompting some to walk down the tracks unsupervised.

Yet more evidence that when it comes to the crunch, capitalist "efficiency" really means potentially deadly cost-cutting.