WHENEVER an ostensibly centre-left pundit uses the magic words ‘think the unthinkable’, don’t expect the ensuing thought experiment to encompass such genuinely radical possibilities as scrapping British nuclear weapons, pulling out of Ireland, coming off the UN security council, abolishing the monarchy, or renationalizing public services.

The same stipulation applies when the summer in Tuscany brigade starts talking about ‘hard choices’. This is almost always introduces an argument for further cuts to the welfare state.

True to form, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown offers readers of the Independent a double whammy of this sort of stuff this morning, alongside an unintentionally hilarious self-description of London middle class lifestyle that would be dismissed as overly stereotypical were it the work of a third rate chick lit writer:

I have been thinking the unthinkable lately. I started doing so after sitting next to Frank Field at a dinner party …

Oh, please, Yazz. Where exactly was this? Don’t tell me, Islington. Just has to be Islington. Why not go the whole hog and tell us who the hostess was, what wine you took along, what was on the menu, and whether or not any of the guests simply had to ask for that delicious recipe, darling.

…. a chap who brings chill into a room and propagates many reactionary views I fear and despise.

Fears and despises that is, unless she happens to agree with them. Which in this case Ms A-B - a woman who apparently fancies herself the victim of 'leftwing McCarthyism', by the way - certainly does.

Yet one grave concern he raised that evening made absolute sense: without some serious economies, Britain will not be able to recover from the effects of this downturn. We are stuffed unless we take heed.

It all kind of depends on who exactly is included in the first person plural, doesn’t it? The bankers who are responsible for the global economic downturn, but who have been bailed out with no personal consequences, are hardly ‘stuffed’, other than perhaps with the finest food and drink money can buy on a £342,500 pension.

How to cut public spending? That is the question to which we need honest answers. Only don't expect them from our elected leaders, busily playing politics even while our land turns hopeless. Instead of sober deliberations over hard choices, we get adolescent baiting and biting between the Tories and Labour.

Just in case you haven’t got the message, Yasmin repeats the hard choices mantra, in a mode befitting the La Pasionaria reincarnate of the London N1 dinner party circuit, suddenly switching on the red rhetoric in much the manner of an old-time commie stump speaker:

Remember how the Left reacted when the number of workless reached 2m under Margaret Thatcher? Well comrades it is much worse today. Choices will have to be made that will be agonising for us on the Left, like the extraction of wisdom teeth. But needs must.

So comrades come rally, and the last fight let us face! Universal child benefit cuts unite the human race!:

I think to pay out for 18 years to every child is something that can't be sustained nor defended when the children in the bottom 20 per cent have fallen so far behind.

What about bus passes for OAPs? An unaffordable luxury in our straightened times, I am afraid, as Yazz realised over yet another meal away from home:

I was lunching with an old school friend in a restaurant near the Royal Court Theatre …

... as you do when you are entirely out of touch with the lives of the vast majority of people in this country …

… when an attractive, slim, blonde woman interrupted us. She thought I was the Indian TV chef Madhur Jaffrey and said she adored my programmes. Not me, I said, and we got chatting.

I got mistaken for Marc Almond once. True.

She was obviously well-heeled, looked in her late forties but told me she was over 60 and had her bus pass. Why? Because that is her right, as it is for all of us in the middle classes.

If I remember correctly, the last time I bought a one-year London bus pass, it cost around £550. Let’s get that sum in perspective. By my maths, Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension – even in its newly reduced magnitude - would pay for 622,000 OAP bus passes. Including one for Fred the Shred.

Ms Alibhai-Brown’s argument that tinkering around with a few minor aspects of welfare provision, which may seem of little import to the kind of people who lunch with old school friends in restaurants near the Royal Court Theatre, will do much to fix Britain’s £1,000,000,000,000 and rising public debt is nonsensical.

Whichever party wins the next election, the prospectus is one of cuts in the welfare state on a scale that will make Thatcherism look like the very model of Beveridgean virtue. By treading down the road advocated by Field, the centre left thereby ceases to be a centre left at all, and becomes indistinguishable from the neoliberal right.

Why should there be any cuts whatsoever in future welfare entitlement to pay for a mess that the creation of a select few? It is the rich that pocketed the handouts and it is the rich that should pay the money back. That much should be axiomatic for the genuine left.