FOR the first time in the history of the NHS, nurses are on strike, joining ambulance drivers, rail and postal workers. This is Britain in 2022 after 12 long years of Tory rule — a veritable utopia for the rich and clawing dystopia for just about everyone else.

Poverty, as everyone who is yet to slide into complete intellectual torpor knows, is no natural phenomenon. It does not fall out of the sky like the rain, and neither does it arrive in our midst like some uncontrollable disease.

Poverty, instead, is the very foundation of a society predicated on the virtues of unfettered capitalism and rampant individualism. And at a time when desensitisation to the ceaseless suffering of millions of our fellow citizens has never been more normalised, Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s moral broadside against poverty has never been more germane:

“The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilisation.”

Britain in 2022 is a country in which the class system is more openly flaunted than in any other across the “industrialised” world. It is also a country where barbarism, dressed up as government policy, reigns.

The mere fact that a UN official — in the person of Professor Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights — should deem it necessary to visit what was then the fifth-largest economy in the world in 2018, which in 2017 boasted a GDP of $2.622 trillion, by itself constituted a searing indictment.

What Alston found in the course of his tour of the country over two weeks, outlined in an excoriating 24-page report, removes any lingering doubt that since coming to power in 2010, successive Tory governments have prosecuted a relentless, systematic, wilful and devastating economic assault against the poorest and most vulnerable sections of British society, tantamount to the unleashing of a class war.

He wrote: “In the past two weeks I have talked with people who depend on food banks and charities for their next meal, who are sleeping on friends’ couches because they are homeless and don’t have a safe place for their children to sleep, who have sold sex for money or shelter, children who are growing up in poverty unsure of their future, young people who feel gangs are the only way out of destitution, and people with disabilities who are being told they need to go back to work or lose support, against their doctor’s orders.”

Taken on their own terms the statistics are damning enough. According to recent research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation 14.5 million people are currently living in poverty across Britain. This translates to a fifth of the population, with four million of them more than 50 per cent below the poverty line. Meanwhile, between one and 1.5 million are destitute, unable to afford even basic essentials.

Even so, no matter how damning, statistics fail to penetrate and expose the actual lived experience of the lives they embrace — people forced every day to surmount the mountain of economic, material, psychological and soul-scorching pain that describes poverty and destitution.

That they do so while surrounded by the ceaseless churning out of propaganda promoting the dominant cultural values of society’s affluent middle class merely adds another layer of psychological humiliation to proceedings.

Returning to Alston: “British compassion for those who are suffering has been replaced by a punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous approach apparently designed to instil discipline where it is least useful, to impose a rigid order on the lives of those least capable of coping with today’s world and elevating the goal of enforcing blind compliance over a genuine concern to improve the wellbeing of those at the lowest levels of British society.”

Set out above is the warped, sociopathic ideology that underpins conservatism. It is an ideology by which concepts such as welfare, solidarity and compassion are anathema, deemed the enemy of human progress as fashioned under deregulated free market capitalism.

But what Alston’s report exposed most of all, and indeed what anyone who cares to notice will already have known, is that the free market is not free.

On the contrary, the toll it exacts is measured in unalterable despair, immiseration, poverty, truncated lives and, in all too many instances, premature death for those bludgeoned by its merciless lack of compassion for the weak in a society configured to serve the needs and interests of the strong.

Perhaps, though, we would rather not be woken up to the brutal reality of Tory Britain that surrounds us, preferring instead to exist in a bubble of denial when it comes to being reduced to passive spectators of the mass experiment in human despair that has and continues to be inflicted on so many by so few.

If so, I respectfully suggest that things have reached the point where denial is no longer an option.

When Karl Marx opined at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” he took a scalpel to the benign mask behind which the snarling, feral beast of class power resides.

But just as you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, neither do you have to be a communist to know what injustice looks like. All you need do for that is take yourself into any jobcentre in any town or city on any given day to see it being played out in real time.

There you will see the human impact of the criminalisation of the poor rather than poverty which the authors and champions of Tory government policy have rolled out.

The staggering thing about it is how easily and willingly those who work in jobcentres and at the DWP are able to dole out this level of economic terrorism.

Where are those with the moral courage and principle to stand up at their desk and proclaim “no I won’t,” it is as if they are part of a vast Milgram experiment, affirming the horrifying extent to which ordinary people are capable of committing monstrous acts of cruelty in obeisance to authority.

Hovering into admonitory relief at this juncture arrive the thoughts of Erich Fromm, who writes, “Once the living human being is reduced to a number, the true bureaucrats can commit acts of utter cruelty, not because they are driven by the cruelty of a magnitude commensurate to their deeds, but because they feel no human bond to their subjects.”

It bears repeating that the financial collapse and ensuing global recession of 2008 was the product of private greed on the part of those for whom the taxpayer was used as a glorified ATM in response, bailing them out to the point where the resulting pain has been almost exclusively borne by the working class.

The reality is that the recession was used as a pretext for an enormous transference of wealth from the poorest in society to the richest, sold as the need to “tighten our belts” and clear up the mess left behind by the previous Labour government.

In the conclusion of his book Austerity: the History of a Dangerous Idea, Professor Mark Blyth writes, “Austerity doesn’t work. Period. The costs of this epistemic arrogance and ideological insistence [in support of austerity] have been, and continue to be, horrendous.

“If European economic policymakers, like medical doctors, had to swear to ‘do no harm,’ they would all be banned from ‘practising’ economics.”

The key word in this aforementioned passage is “ideological.” Austerity is not and never has been driven by economics. It is an ideological weapon deployed in the interests of the rich against the poor in conditions of economic extremes.

It is an attempt to breathe life into the corpse of neoliberalism, that most extreme variant of free market capitalism whose burial is long overdue. But instead of burying neoliberalism, we have a Tory establishment that has opted to bury the most vulnerable with wave after wave of assaults on their ability to survive.

Alston’s 2018 report, commissioned by the UN, amounted to a charge sheet of crimes against humanity. As we approach 2023, the cry for justice rings ever louder.

John Wight blogs at www.johnwight1.medium.com.