Life is sweet for billionaire Lord Alan Sugar, but so it is for everybody, if he is to be believed. In a recent interview, Sugar poured scorn on the idea that there are any seriously impoverished people in Britain. “Who are the poor these days?” he said, sounding irritated by the very mention of the P-word. “You’ve got some people up north and in places like that who are quite poor, but they have all got mobile phones, being poor, and they’ve got microwave ovens, being poor, and they’ve got televisions, being poor.” Such possessions make their situation enviable, he intimated, compared with the truly poverty-stricken days of his childhood, when as a boy in Hackney he recalls people not having enough money for “the electric”.

Clearly, as a philanthropist – indeed, as an ordinary observer – Sugar has some way to go before he reaches even the apprentice stage. The man who cheerfully admits he doesn’t know the price of a dozen eggs – “If you asked me to guess, I’d say a tenner” – hasn’t been on the London underground for quarter of a century, and flies his own private aeroplane. Not that there’s anything wrong with this. Just like the poor, the rich will always be with us, and if they don’t know the cost of a litre of milk, it does not necessarily make them bad people.

It is only when they are so cocooned by luxury, when the rose-tinted mist rises so thickly over their parkland and helipads and penthouses that they cannot see the world beyond their doorstep that wealth becomes a blindfold. When you start telling yourself that those at the bottom of the financial ladder are relatively well off and have nothing to wheenge about, it is obvious that bulging bank accounts and Himalayan stocks and shares portfolios have erected an insurmountable barrier between the gilt-edged and les miserables.

As Sugar and his ilk obviously need reminding, there are plenty of les miserables in Britain, and not just in the remote fastness of “up north”. Those in dire need might not be barefoot, or stitched into their winter clothes, like the wartime evacuees my mother recalled being sent out of London on the train alongside her, but there are very many people unable to afford to put on their central heating or “the electric” when the temperature plummets, or to give their children two, never mind three meals a day, none hot. And most of these are not idlers, or feckless – as if that distinction really matters. Many who rely upon the country’s proliferation of food banks are in work, or are elderly; are disabled, or chronically ill, or ever-hopeful of finding a job.

The hard-luck days Sugar harks back to were a time when living standards were significantly lower than now, even for those in good jobs. The opening sentence of Muriel Spark’s novel The Girls of Slender Means paints a picture familiar to any who recall that era: “Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions.” The difference was that most had to struggle to get by, and the effort to keep up appearances, for almost every class, was all-consuming. By comparison, the gulf between the affluent and the indigent today has widened. There is no longer the shared assumption that thrift is a universal habit, the need to watch the ha’pennies and darn old socks as common in a bank manager’s house as in a typist’s.

The idea that owning a microwave or mobile phone makes everything alright rather misses the point. Poverty is not simply the absence of means to buy the basics essential for living. It is also missing out on the regular things that make existence pleasurable or tolerable. It is about inequality: not being able to participate in everyday activities, or hold the same aspirations as one’s peers. Beyond the need for nourishing food, decent clothes and healthy accommodation there is now an abundance of digital technology required for being a fully functioning child, student, employee, friend or parent. Not having access to this is an entirely new kind of deprivation, as yet largely unquantified by indices of wealth.

Yet the worst thing about being poor is still the stigma. It was always thus, but rarely has the opprobrium been greater. Now, the very idea of poverty makes people uneasy. As Sugar’s callous and ignorant comments reveal, the gap between the haves and have nots is not just a question of income. It is about a poverty of imagination among those so cushioned by money they simply don’t want to consider how the less fortunate are obliged to live. The wealthy who refuse to see the poor all around them have everything you could ever ask for, it seems, except a beating heart.