A scheme to get claimants off long term disability back to work is turning into something of a PR nightmare for the government. The sight of disabled protesters and their growing number of supporters taking to the streets, after a widely acclaimed Paralympics, is one it might wish to avoid.

On Saturday afternoon I, along with a couple of hundred other people, spent two hours sitting in the middle of the road at Oxford Circus. Why? To draw attention to the cruelty of the government's assault on disabled people in the Welfare Reform Bill, which finishes its journey through parliament this coming week.

Asking peers to accept an arbitrary one year time limit for Employment and Support Allowance payments for cancer patients and others to recover from their gruelling treatment and get back behind a desk or onto the factory floor was always going to be a tough sell, and so it proved yesterday evening.