It is hardly a revelation to find this or that politician is a dissembler or disingenuous. To quote the old staple Orwell: "Politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly... When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer." Nothing new under the sun and all that. But recently the coalition has been indulging in misinformation in such quantities that it leads towards one unpleasant and depressing conclusion: This government probably hates you.
The policy pronouncements and the language used to make them do not merely demonstrate contempt for nurses or teachers or the unemployed - they demonstrate contempt for almost every voter in the country (including most of the people who supported coalition parties at the last election).
Nobody likes to feel their intelligence has been insulted. When you sense a falsehood is being peddled as fact it makes you feel violated, as if you've just come home to find your house has been broken into. But that is what is happening on a weekly basis in British politics. And with no one of any party able to offer much hope of better economic prospects in the near future, it may be that the next election will be won and lost on issues of trust. Consider the gap between the absurdities of what is said and what many voters are beginning to understand.
George Osborne recently blamed the Euro crisis for his inability to do anything about the recession. Until that point it had been the fault of last Labour government (although he once also blamed the Royal wedding). But Osborne supported Labour's spending plans right up their final year in office. The deficit reduction drum is still being beaten threadbare in speeches and interviews, yet this week we again see government borrowing rising. This abnegation of responsibility runs through the entire administration. It is like Moses blaming pharaoh for the golden calf. People sense they are being conned.
Then there is the temerity of the doublespeak. Michael Gove claims "competitive dumbing down" has dropped GSCE standards (an exam introduced by a Conservatives in 1988). This presumably is also an indictment of school league tables (ditto in 1992). But more bizarre is the implicit condemnation of competition itself, a concept so beloved of Conservatives that has been used as an excuse for almost anything, from the disastrous privatisation of the railways in 1993 to the proposed privatisation in the NHS, the police, prisons and education. Just how stupid does Gove think we are? The answer, it appears, is very.
In the last week David Laws and his successor at the Treasury, Danny Alexander, have called for more benefit cuts and austerity, even though they were both elected as Liberal Democrats on a platform of increased public investment and higher taxes for the rich. Laws had the brass neck to endorse a proposed cut in housing benefit despite being caught fiddling his expenses over a second home. In which parallel universe is this a credible politician, let alone a moral one?
Another example of how little regard leading Conservatives have for the critical faculties of the great unwashed was William Hague's decision that Foreign Office representatives would not be attending Euro 2012 in protest at Ukrainian treatment of Yulia Tymoshenko. They did, however, admit that if England progressed further than expected in the competition they would reconsider their position, the clear implication being that should the nation become intoxicated with patriotic football fervour, the government reserved the right to cash in on it.
And then there is David Cameron, who intervened with spectacular cack-handedness over reports of Jimmy Carr's tax avoidance, then went on to attack what he called - with a straight face - the culture of entitlement in the benefits system. Carr's scheme helped him save about £1.5m, something the prime minister described as "morally wrong" (Osborne went one better in March, calling tax dodges "morally repugnant"). Vodafone alone was let off around £4bn in corporation tax, which is twice what Cameron says the government would save by cutting housing benefit for the under-25s.
The industrial-scale hypocrisy of the tax situation is cranked up another notch by the well-founded suspicion that many, if not most, of the individuals and businesses which fund the Tory party employ some form of tax avoidance scheme. And we are sold this spiel as the government says it will stamp out tax avoidance while making massive cuts to HMRC, the people who are supposed to stamp out tax avoidance. Figuratively speaking, I feel like these politicians have not just broken into my house but have also taken a dump on the floor.
On top of all this is the continuing employment of Jeremy Hunt. It is perhaps this, more than any other policy or PR exercise, that defines how Cameron's clique sees itself and how it will come to be regarded by the rest of the country. However feeble reporting of government spin can sometimes be, Hunt's survival is an insult the public will find hard to ignore.
These examples - and there are many others - show what little value most coalition members attach to their role as representatives of the electorate. This government is disappearing into the distance, out of sight from any notion of serving the interests of the vast majority of voters. So the critical issue is this: if the government thinks we are too dumb or venal or lazy to register any meaningful response to the rhetorical camouflage behind which its leading figures hide, we can either prove it wrong or prove it right. The consequences of the latter are almost too frightening to consider.