Merely a week after their abject defeat in the bedroom tax debate, Tory MPs were put under further pressure yesterday as protesters took to the streets against benefit sanctions.

Welfare defence groups including the Anti-Bedroom Tax and Benefit Justice Campaign and Disabled Peoples Against the Cuts (DPAC), together with civil servants union PCS, hosted a day of action with demonstrations taking place across the country.

In Manchester and Birmingham activists assembled outside local job centres, while marches and rallies were also organised in Leeds, Huddersfield, Ashton and Milton Keynes.

Brighton activists are planning direct action for today — much like Oxford protesters, who headed to Witney to lobby a Conservatives event with tax-dodging MP Nadim Zahawi.

Yet it was in London that much of the main action took place.

Activists set up camp in front of Parliament from early in the day, naming and shaming politicians complicit with an increase in sanctions from 100,000 to more than a million in the last three years.

Dpac spokeswoman Paula Peters said the action was a celebration of all the campaign’s recent victories but there is “a lot more work to do in the months to come.

“We have got to get a lot more people to wake up and see what’s going on because they too can lose their job, and they can become sick and disabled, and go through the work capability assessment process,” she added.

The groups had also recently revealed that cuts to the employment and support allowance alone deepened by 580 per cent in the last year.

The abolition of the independent living fund, which allows disabled people to lead independent working lives by covering the costs of care assistance, will be challenged in court this October.

The closure had been stopped by the Court of Appeal at the end of last year, having been deemed a breach of the Equalities Act.

The will of these campaigners for social justice to take action, however, is unrelenting.

“I think these protests are always important,” said National Pensioners Convention general secretary Dot Gibson.

Ms Gibson that “a lot of the issues that are faced by disabled people and homeless people, and people who are on short term contracts and zero-hours contracts and unemployed” were the same.

“Yet of course the powers that be keep on trying to separate pensioners from them — it’s not a question of young or old it’s a question of rich and poor.”

Ms Gibson agreed with Ms Peters that in the months coming to the general election much needs to be done to catch people’s attention to these problems.

“There is going to be a watershed because people are aching for something to really represent them,” she argued.

She told the Star of her frustration that many young people think there is no future as, unlike her, they had not grown up with a government supporting “policies on social justice and nationalised industries and developed housing estates, and the NHS.

“Now we are talking about is actually standing up for our rights against those profiteers and privatisers who are taking everything that was gained,” she said.