Many years ago, as a teenager, I saw some pictures of destitute families in Victorian London which left a deep impression.

I’ve been thinking about those images today. One of them depicted a gaunt woman with her child on her knee. The child was bundled up in rags but her eyes were closed and her face was deathly white. Two other children crouched on the floor. They were huddled in a bare, unlit, unheated hovel with a broken window and no food or comfort. It was a scene of hopelessness and desperation.

I remember thinking how incredible it was that people were living like that in their hundreds of thousands in this country just a century earlier. There was plenty of wealth in Victorian Britain, but it was grossly unequal in its distribution. How much better things had become, I thought.

Well, I’ve learned a thing or two since then. We may use terms like “relative poverty” to make clear that deprivation today is no longer analogous to Victorian-style penury, but in 2022, unbelievably, there are still powerful echoes in many people’s lives of the suffering in that picture.

We take for granted today that everyone has access to amenities like heating, lighting and food, but having access to them is not the same as using them. Stories of people being unable to afford health-sustaining basics are shockingly commonplace.

There is something deeply dysfunctional about a society as wealthy as ours that is failing to prevent such distress.

A caller to the LBC radio station yesterday, Hzul, told the Chancellor Rishi Sunak that in spite of having what was considered a well-paid job, her income was no longer covering her outgoings and she didn’t know what to do to provide for her children.

She told the Chancellor: “The significant increase in our energy bill has meant that we don’t have the boiler on. The lights are always off unless absolutely necessary and when it’s cold, we wear jumpers and coats and sometimes you can see our breaths when we breathe.

“Despite having a full-time job I’ve had to find ways to bridge the gap. I’ve started cleaning houses, I spend every evening riding a bike delivering for Uber Eats, I’ve managed to cut my grocery shop down to just £15 a week for an adult and two children, and I often go without myself to make sure the kids get what they need and they’re fed.”

Victorian social reformers like Joseph Rowntree and Thomas Barnardo would have recognised much of what she said.

In response Rishi Sunak spoke of his £150 council tax rebate and raising the national insurance threshold in July (curiously, he suffered momentary amnesia about the national insurance rise he’s imposing next month which will largely wipe out the saving). But as Hzul pointed out, that level of support “isn’t relative at all” to the huge rise in costs she was facing. She predicted that people would get “very, very ill” because they couldn’t afford to heat their homes.

And that’s the problem. It would be unrealistic to imagine that Mr Sunak could take away all the pain of energy rises and inflation, but he could have done a good deal more than he did, particularly for the worst-off.

That’s why the criticism has been near-universal. The Resolution Foundation think tank predicts that 1.3m people in the UK will be pushed into absolute poverty this year, accusing Mr Sunak of prioritising his tax-cutting credentials over helping the low-to-middle income households who will be worst hit.

Paul Johnson of the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) abandoned his usually restrained demeanour to tweet: “Oh for goodness sake. What is the possible justification for cutting income tax rate while raising NI rate? Drives further wedge between taxation of unearned income and earned income. Yet again benefits pensioners and those living off rents at expense of workers.”

Which is, sadly, the point of it. With his fuel tax cut and NI increase, he is shielding comfortably off Conservative voters (many of whom are retired and don’t pay NI) and building up a political war chest to fund Tory-friendly pre-election tax cuts.

Above all, as Paul Johnson points out, he has done “nothing more” for “the very poorest” – those dependent on benefits – besides a limited extra sum to councils for hardship payments. Benefits will go up by 3.1 per cent next month against inflation of eight per cent.

The Chancellor has carefully suggested that the cost-of-living crisis is due to external pressures, particularly the war in Ukraine. In point of fact, we were knee-deep in it before a single Russian tank was anywhere to be seen. Don’t expect any acknowledgement of Brexit-related price rises, the impact of slashing Universal Credit or the decision to raise money for health and social care through national insurance instead of more progressive taxation, even though these things are all contributing to the most rapid fall in living standards since the Fifties.

It’s true that Mr Sunak was faced with an uncommon set of challenges, but he could have taken an uncommon course of action to deal with it – such as imposing a windfall tax on the unexpected billions that have gushed into the bank accounts of oil companies, wealth that has been redistributed to them from people on the poverty line.

He chose not to.

And what of the Scottish Government? Doubling the Scottish Child Payment next month to £20 and boosting it again to £25 by the end of the year, is a great policy. But ministers could do more. We are still waiting for a fairer system to replace council tax, years after it was first mooted, even though it would have made a major difference to poorer households by now if it were up and running. For now, Scottish ministers are adopting the Chancellor’s £150 council tax rebate. The Scottish Government has received £45m as a result of the Spring Statement, an admittedly inadequate sum, but it must now target that wholly at those who need it most.

No one will escape the pain in this crisis but it exposes once again that it’s always the worst off who suffer the most. The balance is all wrong, but it’s hard to see it changing under the current regime.

Rishi Sunak, once dubbed the “people’s chancellor”, is now revealing himself as the right-wing economic hardliner he actually is. Or at least the one he thinks he needs to be for a leadership challenge. Either way, it says a lot about his priorities.

This is round one, with the autumn budget still to come. Perhaps by then it will have dawned on Mr Sunak that he needs to offer more support to Red Wall Tory voters of modest means.

In the mean time, as in the Victorian era, it will be philanthropy that steps in where government has fallen short, through food banks and other charities. Things really haven’t got much better at all.

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