It was somewhere on Charing Cross Road that the man caught my eye. It was 1996, and the air was suffocated with incipient Blairism, Britpop, and Skinner & Baddiel. I had just emigrated from a Proddy corner of Northern Ireland to a booming London.

The fellow had attracted my attention because he was lying in the foetal position, draped loosely in weather-damaged cardboard, and faced towards a shop window. He’d left a paper cup for small change. He looked like a man who had been utterly destroyed by life. Pedestrian feet skirted nimbly around him. I stopped everything I was doing and gawped. This was the first time I’d ever seen such a thing.

Seriously? I knew, of course, that homelessness existed. But there is a world of difference between such abstract knowledge, and the first heart-stopping sight of it. And there was no reason for it. It was absurdly unjust. The country was groaning with wealth. The rich were raking in more money than they could sensibly dispose of. And there were people collecting change in paper cups and sleeping in cardboard bedding.

Compared with today’s culture, that forgotten era seems like a very Arcadia. For this is a time in which beggars, not homelessness or poverty, are treated as a social evil to be attacked from every angle. This is a time when, in York, the Salvation Army will team up with coppers and the local authorities to “fight beggars”.

Why are they fighting beggars? Because, they say, begging is illegal and intimidating. Let’s start with the law. The legislation under which begging is illegal is the Vagrancy Act of 1824, which actually made it an offence to be homeless, not just to beg. It was intended to control the numbers of ex-soldiers living rough after having extirpated the final energies of the French revolution in the Napoleonic wars. Like all anti-vagrancy legislation, this identified a social dysfunction as an individual moral failure. It also specifically set out to penalise non-market transactions, and reinforce dependency on capitalist markets. No wonder that such antique laws find new force in the neoliberal era.

And what of this notion that begging is intimidating? In 18 years of living in London, the one thing that has struck me about the scores of beggars who have asked me for change is how dispiritingly supplicant they are about it. I daresay this fear of beggars derives in certain quarters from the expectation of “underclass” revenge: that is, it is rooted in a guilt complex.

However, it is also linked to a violent moralism. There is no real reason, police and politicians insist, for anyone to be begging. Apparently it is impossible in this society, after the longest drop in living standards since the Depression, and with benefits being slashed, for anyone to become so poor as to have to ask strangers for help. Presumably, the inference goes, those asking for money must be idle con artists. Everyone has heard the anecdotes: some beggars make £50 a day just sitting in the shopping centre. Such claims, unless begging incomes are somehow audited on a daily basis, are likely confected. However, they work as morality fables, pitting beggars against the honest and “hard-working”. To this extent, the war on beggars is simply the spruced up, sanitised and sophisticated version of the “get a fucking job” school of homeless-bashing.

York city council, be it noted, is under Labour control. And while it doesn’t do to airbrush the past, this surely represents something of a nadir. For what happened between 1996 and 2014, what helped poison the political culture more than any other event, was a long period of New Labour government.

Things, they said, in what is now a mirthless irony, could only get better. But while the Tories had been vicious to the poor, it transpired that New Labour had its own nasty streak. Certainly it offered moderate social reform, linked to paternalistic forms of intervention. It targeted social exclusion and tried to reduce rough sleeping.

However, it was also New Labour that made begging a recordable offence in 2003, as part of its authoritarian crackdown on “anti-social behaviour”. It was Paul Boateng, as a New Labour minister, who was sent on to the BBC to denounce beggars and urge people not to give them money. It was New Labour that most aggressively promulgated the idea that homelessness and poverty was a result of individual failure not capitalist failure. And – I don’t think this is coincidental – it was under New Labour that an obnoxious, poor-baiting culture became respectable. The hard-nosed, punitive values of Thatcherism never flourished as much under Thatcher as they did under Tony Blair.

If you want to know why the coalition austerians have had such an easy run, consider that we have become a society in which the “nuisance” of begging is considered a greater social ill than the poverty and homelessness of which it is a manifestation.