SCOTTISH Tory welfare spokeswoman Michelle Ballantyne was widely condemned this week after she said it was “fair” that benefit recipients could not have “as many children as they like.”

The pressure mounting on Scottish Tory chiefs to remove her from their front bench is a sign of how far we’ve come. It wasn’t too long ago that figures from across the political spectrum were regularly indulging in this kind of rhetoric. It was a true race to the bottom.

Standing for the Labour deputy leadership in 2015, Caroline Flint gave an exclusive interview to the Sun in which she said it was time to give people who “choose to live on benefits” (the Sun’s paraphrase) a “kick up the backside” (Flint’s own words).

Earlier this year it emerged that Tory vice-chair Ben Bradley had railed against “families who have never worked a day in their lives having four or five kids” in a 2012 blog post.

He said this would leave us “drowning in a vast sea of unemployed wasters that we pay to keep,” adding: “vasectomies are free.”

On the day the news emerged, LBC radio asked me to respond to his comments. I warned there was a thin line between Bradley’s remarks and the eugenicist policies promoted in Nazi Germany and Singapore — where the government offered poor women large sums of cash to get sterilised in the decades after World War II.

But depressingly, many of those calling the show expressed sympathy with Bradley’s perspective. LBC callers are never a scientific sample, but it was astounding to hear that even a small handful of the British public had forgotten the lessons of history.

It’s welcome that the demonisation of benefit recipients is now at least being challenged. But the powerful figures who propagated it — or jumped on the bandwagon — have poisoned the public debate. That is unforgivable.