Inside the country, Fidesz has favoured the middle class, and especially the upper middle class, thereby building a core clientele of politically active supporters – while slashing benefits for the neediest (about a third of Hungarians live in poverty – don't be fooled by the glittering, EU-funded projects in the centre of Budapest).
He confronted her at a local food bank by asking how "a Tory MP who votes for slashing welfare benefits" copes with visiting a place that "feeds the poorest of her constituents?" He says: "Mary Macleod has never been shown to her constituents in this manner.
It does so by snapping up rivals, adopting their new drugs, while slashing payrolls and research budgets.
Which leads me to the conclusion that the reason coalition ministers don't mind slashing entitlements for disabled people, are quite happy to use them as guinea pigs for new benefits that don't work, and to chuck them at incompetents such as Atos, is because they couldn't care less.
Always more interested in tactics than policy, at the end of the 1980s he had looked across the Irish Sea and liked what he saw: a Celtic Tiger slashing corporation tax and attracting international businesses to Dublin.
Harriet Harman, the shadow media secretary, has been critical of cuts to arts funding, saying in 2013 that slashing money for the Arts Council was "threatening the future of our arts and creative industries".
Of course his colleagues are now out of the poo as well and for a lot of the time on Saturday they played like it, slashing their way through the puddles to establish what looked a match-winning 41-point lead in the dying stages of the third quarter.
A chancellor from another, better era might have gone further, and argued that sharing the bill for bailing out the UK economy should be done as fairly as possible, rather than just by slashing spending on schools, universities and the rest of the public services.
The bedroom tax, the changes to sickness and out of work benefits, the rhetoric about 'shirkers', the horrendous 'assessments' by Atos, the slashing of social care budgets, and the costly and disastrous reorganisation of the NHS: all of these policies have been ideologically driven by people who fundamentally doubt the sick, disabled and unemployed's right to a decent quality of life.
LU bosses are in dispute with unions over plans to close ticket offices across the tube network, slashing 900 jobs.
Only Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, hailed for pushing through anti-union legislation and slashing public spending in his Democratic-leaning state, appeared to match Cruz for enthusiasm among voters.
