At the back of Mel Richards’ adapted housing association flat on Grassmarket is a flight of stairs to magnificent (and magnificently central) Edinburgh castle.

This juxtaposition does the heart good. Most council or HA flats I’ve seen so far have been stuck at the butt-end of town, but these guys have killed on Location. This is mixed residence at its very best, in the bricks-and-mortar sense: a great castle rising from Castle Rock at one end of a flight of stairs and a small block of housing association flats at the other. Paul Dacre would detonate at this evidence of the poor shoehorning themselves into a fancy tourist address on housing benefit, but let’s leave him to blow for now. It’s cheering to find these flats in such a beautiful part of town. It’s also uplifting to know that they’d get right on Dacre’s tits.

As would some of the people inside the flats, I imagine, although I wonder if he’d know how to class them.

The woman I’ve come to talk to – Mel Richards, a one-time British-Australian journalist who has a degenerative and disabling nerve-damage condition – is a rightwinger. “I’m definitely from the right – I’m not a Tory, but I would describe myself as from the right.”

She is, however, fiercely opposed to the government’s benefit cuts proposals. This is partly because she relies on state support (and will continue to do as her health deteriorates – “come back in ten years and I’ll still be on benefits”) and partly because she believes that there is such a thing as welfare entitlement. She says that government and media rhetoric about Scroungers and The Workshy should have no place in an adult discussion about give-and-take taxation.

Richard’s thesis is simple: if you pay national insurance contributions when you’re working (which she did), you can expect some state support when you need it (which she does). The rest of it she writes off as name-calling. “Iain Duncan Smith just told the Sun that it’s our [people on benefits] fault – that we’re to blame for the international financial crisis. Nobody can work out what the hell they are up to.”

Her dislike of government rhetoric has landed her behind unexpected lines. She ran a campaign called “I’m from the Right, but I think cuts are wrong,” which saw her join union rallies and marches – her first. “I was in the middle of a union rally with my banner saying “I’m from the Right, but I think cuts are wrong,” on my scooter.”

That may not sound like much, except that in her case, it is. Until now, Richards simply hasn’t Done the left. She says she once missed a good job in Australia, because she wasn’t a union member. Thus, one of the not-so-widely-trumpeted offshoots of Osborne’s cuts programme – odd bedfellows. The left-right battle is not, perhaps, as one’s (admittedly beloved) twitter imagines it. Out here, sworn ideological enemies turn up on common ground.

All sorts of people are joining these forces. A second woman sits in on this interview and contributes regularly to it. She is a Tory and a one-time member of the Oxford University Conservative Association. Her name is Helen Dale.

Dale has been at Oxford finishing a law degree. She is highly intelligent and a steamroller with it. She brings a free-form view. Like me, Richards and Dale were raised in the Antipodes and have little notion of class and party loyalty. Like me, they have every notion of pragmatism, anti-authoritarianism and of riding the pendulum from left to right to left to right. At one point, Richards says mobility schemes for the disabled should just be handed to people who run big taxi companies – that is to say, people who know the best ways to get cars from A to B quickly and safely. That is such an Antipodean observation that I laugh out loud: utter pragmatism with a moral imperative.

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The problem is that pragmatism and moral imperative are in short supply in the government’s cuts programme. Dale and Richards want the numbers to add, and they don’t (they particularly unimpressed with testing proposals for incapacity benefit and DLA: they feel IDS wastes money the state doesn’t have by testing claimants twice). Richards refuses to accept that Entitlement is synonymous with Scrounger. There’s as little in it for her as there is for any of her new union acquaintances.

Richards has been collecting benefits for ten years – incapacity benefit and disability living allowance (she’s just been reassessed for DLA and has been told – a great relief to her – that she is eligible for higher rate care and higher rate mobility).

That, as we has observed, is as it should be in her mind. “You can’t qualify onto incapacity unless you’ve been working and paying national insurance (which is correct, by and large). That is the idea of entitlement – you pay contributions, so you are entitled [to collect if something goes wrong].

Dale thinks that the party agrees. “Most Tories divide people into the worthy and unworthy poor. They don’t want tests drawn so tightly that they exclude the worthy poor.”

Both say that incentives to work are key. Richards says those incentives are missing. “You’re allowed [to earn] £20 a week. Above that, you lose one pound from each means-tested benefit. This puts people off doing even a little bit of work.” She tells a story about the time when she first became disabled “and I was looking into doing the occasional freelance article, but if I did that, I would be considered self-employed and no longer eligible for benefits. I went to an advisory service and this lovely lady said “have you considered asking them (the freelance employers) to pay you in cash?” People are being told to cheat and lie because the system is so unfair.”

“I will say one thing for Labour’s tax credits,” says Dale. “They did make a difference to a large class of people who were non-workers. It had the effect of getting a lot of single mothers back into the workforce. It also had the effect of reducing the mean fertility of single mothers. They would opt to keep their job and have an abortion rather than having a child. This is going to sound very Tory… but people do respond to incentives.”

Richards likes the plan that she based her “I’m from the Right” campaign on. The idea is (Vince Cable had a similar one) is to change the system so that nobody pays tax for the first £10,000 they earn. In Richards’ world, the state would pay for this by scrapping tax credits and tax credits administration. In Cable’s world (his pre-election one) the state would claw the cash back by chasing tax avoiders. Richards’ proposal “would also pay for whatever changes they wanted to make to welfare.” She has a flyer with this headline: “give me £10,000 and I will save you £23.7billion” (she says the £23.7b is the cost of the tax credits bureaucracy). That way, she says, working would always pay more than welfare. People would have an incentive to work “without intrusive monitoring and coercion by the DWP.”

Entitlement, dignity and fiscal responsibility, then. Pity the government’s programme isn’t about those. The assault on the welfare-dependent has nothing to do with saving money and everything to do with destroying notions of “public” and “give-and-take.” Doesn’t take a mad leftie to pick it.