The Tories have created a new poverty – one so deep and vicious it requires Victorian vocabulary

A sign painted on the side of a house directs people to a local food bank in Leeds, October 2022. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

It starts slowly at first. A food bank crops up inside your local mosque. You notice more sleeping bags on the walk to work. Over time, the signs seem to grow. A donation bin appears in Tesco for families who can’t afford soap or toothpaste. Terms such as “bed poverty” emerge in the news because we now need vocabulary to describe children who are so poor that they have to sleep on the floor.

Then one day you read a statistic that somehow feels both shocking and wearily unsurprising: about 3.8 million people experienced destitution in the UK last year. That’s the equivalent of almost half the population of London being unable to meet their most basic needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed.