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The UN Special Rapporteur, Raquel Rolnik, denounced the Coalition’s so-called ‘bedroom tax’ as a fundamental breach of international human rights and called for it to be scrapped.

For the uninitiated, the ‘spare room subsidy’, to use its official name, is being withdrawn from council tenants who no longer need the space. The aim is to encourage them to downsize to free up homes for larger families who are living in overcrowded accommodation.

Most people would agree that it is a sensible, well- intentioned measure designed to ease Britain’s desperate housing shortage and reduce the nation’s debilitating welfare bill.

Not The Guardian, obviously. Or the BBC. To them it’s just another example of the heartless‘savage cuts’. And now they had an ally, complete with the full authority of the United Nations, no less.

Miss Rolnik, an Esther Rantzen lookalike in a pair of Dame Edna Everage’s pink spectacles, declared that the policy would hit ‘the most vulnerable, the most fragile, the people who are on the fringes of coping with everyday life’.

She told The Guardian: ‘I was very shocked to hear how people really feel abused in their human rights by this decision and why — being so vulnerable — they should pay for the cost of the economic downturn, which was brought about by the financial crisis.

‘People in testimonies were crying, saying “I have nowhere to go” and “I will commit suicide”.’

Listening to Miss Rolnik expand upon her views on the BBC’s Today programme, which naturally takes its Pavlovian lead from The Guardian, I felt like taking my own life.

She had based her opinion on ‘confidential’ interviews with unnamed individuals in Belfast, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh and London, where she visited food banks, council estates and homeless crisis centres.

My guess is that her interviewees were supplied by the same Left-wing agit-prop groups who provide the BBC with their never-ending conga line of ‘victims’.

The BBC did at least offer the Tory chairman Grant Shapps the right of reply. He quite rightly dismissed the report as an ‘absolute disgrace’ and categorically denied Miss Rolnik’s claims that she was here at the invitation of the British Government. Shapps intends to lodge a formal complaint with the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. Who can blame him?

Not that Shapps can expect much of a sympathetic response. The UN has plenty of previous when it comes to this kind of stunt.