If you work in a shop, you’ll have noticed an extraordinary wave of thefts that retailers link to a growing black market in food. If you work in a hospital, you might have clocked a surge in diagnoses of malnutrition and other dietary deficiencies among patients. If you’ve walked around any large British city with your eyes open of late, you’ll have noticed a proliferation of street tents.
The crisis of penury gripping the UK has long been abjectly evident everywhere – except in the official poverty data. The chancellor and the prime minister have lost no chance to boast that Conservative-led governments have since 2010 “lifted” two million people, including hundreds of thousands of children, “out of absolute poverty”. The experts explain that this particular count will always go down just so long as poor people are thrown a few crumbs from a growing economy – and that those crumbs have been very small of late.
