Know Your Enemy

"The bottom line is that much of the glue that has held British society together since the Second World War has been deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos."

Philip Alston, the UN's special rapporteur on extreme poverty, pulls absolutely no punches in his report into poverty in the UK. The key word there is "deliberately" - he is in no doubt that ideology is the prime motivating factor behind the austerity measures that have led to the "systematic immiseration" of a large sector of British society, and warns that the combination of poverty and savage welfare cuts has created a "highly combustible situation" that will have (and indeed is already having) "tragic consequences".

Given that Amber Rudd responded to Alston's preliminary findings by denouncing "the extraordinary political nature of his language" and Iain Duncan Smith dismissed Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake as a work of fiction, it's hardly surprising to see that the Tories have reacted not by being chastened but by criticising the full report as "barely believable" and as "paint[ing] a completely inaccurate picture of our approach to tackling poverty". That phrase alone - "our approach to tackling poverty" - is laughable; their "approach" to poverty is at best to ignore it and at worst to proactively create it.