Sir Sigmund Freud wanted to help selected clients from the Viennese bourgeoisie overcome their neuroses; his great-grandson wants to get two million British proles off incapacity benefit and into badly-paid jobs. Even given the four generations between them, that is big time mission creep for any family.

New Labour has hired former City banker David Freud to implement recommendations that he himself drew up for getting the long-term unemployed - especially those currently larging it on £81.35 of taxpayer cash a week because they are deemed unfit for employment - back into work.

That’s a worthwhile aim, of course. Persistent long-term unemployment – and I have experienced it myself – is a massive waste of human potential, and one of the prime indictments of capitalism.

The left would expect a Labour government to do everything possible to tackle this issue. Measures worth considering include investment in education, to ensure that Britain has a skilled workforce; investment in social housing, to secure greater mobility; investment in public transport, to enable people to get to work; and, where supply side measures are not enough, investment in the means of production to create jobs directly.

But this is not what Freud advocates. His classically free market answer is to put the private sector on piece work. Firms will get anything up to £50,000 for placing someone in a job for more than three years and nothing if they fail.

Business will make – to use the word employed by Freud himself – masses of money in the process:

We can pay masses - I worked out that it is economically rational to spend up to £62,000 on getting the average person on Incapacity Benefit into work.

Mention masses of dosh, and you can expect instant international interest; the Financial Times today brings readers up to speed with what’s happening in the ‘multi-billion pound welfare to work market’, and lists the main players likely to scoop up the contracts.

Should socialists be against the idea on principle? After all, if it means people that need jobs finding jobs, does it matter if a private company picks up a few quid in the process? It can’t be worse than paying the Corrections Corporation of America to bang ‘em up in Doncatraz, I guess. But the worry has to be how the scheme will work in practice.

The impact of the Freud reforms is likely to be felt most by on those on incapacity benefit. The number of claimants only really took off in the 1980s, when Britain was picking up the pieces after Thatcher’s deliberate decision to deindustrialise. The left at the time argued that this was a scam to massage reduce the number of unemployment benefit claimants at a time when the dole queues topped 3m, and there is little reason to change this assessment.

Freud is on record as suggesting that only 700,000 of around 2.7m IB claimants should be getting a weekly sum of money that doesn’t pick up a lunch tab for two in the City. The point is arguable. But surely a doctor – rather than some suit with a 50k incentive to get the sick flipping burgers – is the best judge of that?

While I haven’t seen the small print, I’m not aware of any structural dimension to what Freud is proposing. High densities of long-term unemployment are regionally concentrated, because the industries that once sustained entire communities no longer exist.

The good jobs aren’t there any more; if claimants are forced into the labour market, it will be at the expense of existing badly paid workers, who will find their wages yet further undercut.

As David’s great granddad could have told them, no amount of wish fulfillment fantasy on New Labour’s part is going to change that.

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.