What image will social historians use to capture our times? Last week, after frenzied bidding, a drab garage next to a Camberwell industrial estate in what was once a cheap part of south London, sold for £550,000. That might do. No one who sniffs the air can fail to notice that London in the Osborne bubble has a whiff of Weimar Germany – but without the art or indeed the sex.

Yet alongside oligarchs buying the capital's streets, and the Bank of England and Treasury pumping asset prices, we also have poverty that those of us who remember the recessions of the 1970s and 80s have not seen before.

Food banks will be to the 2010s what hunger marches were to the 1930s. But they are not dramatic places. You don't see queues of distressed people waiting by their doors. The food banks are discreet. The Anglicans who run them show their kindness by doing nothing to draw attention to their clients' poverty.

For all their unobtrusiveness, food banks might do as a symbol of our times too. But for me, the best way of summing up the division between rich and poor, and high and low, is a contract stating that "hours of work will be advised by the visitor manager and will be dependent upon the requirements for retail assistants". The staff had no security, the contract made clear. Their employers guaranteed them no minimum income. The bosses might leave them at home from one week to the next, while still insisting that the casual workers remained available to work for them and them alone.

The contract says so much because the employer in question was not some crook but the Queen – whom everyone in authority assures us is a benign sovereign who cares for every one of her subjects. Her Majesty's exploited servants were to show tourists round Buckingham Palace's staterooms, when and only when the monarchy thought it had no choice but to pay them.

As the recession grew, the wealthy were finding new ways of encouraging poverty by keeping the poor on zero-hours contracts whose average hourly rates were 40% below the "normal" earnings for the work. Not just oligarchs it is easy to despise as cruel foreigners, but the British monarch and head of state.

The account of royal miserliness comes from the forthcoming Hard Times by Tom Clark, a leader writer on the Guardian. I hope it sells because Clark is the first author I know of who has examined the data on the great recession and shown that booms and busts are like Tolstoy's families. All happy financial bubbles are alike but each recession is unhappy in its own way.

Many commentators, including me, expected the great crash of 2008 to produce mass unemployment as the great crash of 1929 led to the mass unemployment of the 30s. Because labour is so cheap, we have instead an English-speaking world without neat boundaries. For the majority of people, the division of time into the years of boom and the years of bust makes little sense. In America, the average worker has not had a pay rise since 1973. In Britain, median full-time pay stopped rising in 2000, then collapsed after the crash. The great recession came after 30 years of the rich leaving the rest behind. (In the past two decades, for instance, the top 1% has grabbed three-fifths of all the gains in American growth.) The majority of the population did not enjoy a boom in the past decade: just a bust in 2008. As Osborne tries to sneak an election victory in 2015 by letting the housing market soar and fall yet again, another boomless bust is coming.

The division between work and unemployment is no longer clear either. Is someone sitting in a bedsit waiting for the Queen or some other cheapskate racketeer to call, employed or unemployed? All you can usefully say is, for the millions living on or near the minimum wage, work can no longer bring them dignity and security. As Clark puts it: "The poverty figures always used to report a cast-iron link with unemployment; now a child officially classed as poor is almost twice as likely to come from a working as a workless home."

The right has had a great propaganda success in blaming poverty on fecklessness. It is not only Conservatives and Ukip voters who believe the unemployed sit at home laughing as they hoard their benefits, but many Labour supporters too. I wouldn't be too cocky if I were a Tory, though. History is moving away from the right, and not just because its notions of the causes of poverty are partisan fairy stories. The crash destroyed the belief that financial markets were best left to regulate themselves and sent the property-owning democracy into retreat.

David Cameron thought the great recession would encourage a "big society", where people help one another. He did not know, and no one had the nerve to tell him, that hard times destroy altruism. In 2005, 44% of people in England and Wales offered unpaid time to help others. By 2010, only 37% did, and the amount of time they were prepared to sacrifice had fallen too. Above all else, conservatism is damned by the waste and suffering it tolerates.

In October 1777, a friend of Adam Smith brought him the news that incompetent politicians and outmanoeuvred generals had allowed the American rebels to defeat the British army at Saratoga. The American war was lost and nation was ruined, he cried.

Smith took the news calmly. He knew that strong countries could absorb the worst their leaders could do to them. "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation," he replied.

We are an incomparably richer country than Georgian Britain. We are far richer than the depression-hit Britain of the 1930s our grandparents and great-grandparents knew, or even the miserable Britain of my childhood in the 1970s. There's more ruin in this nation now.

It ought to have been possible to endure the great recession without the food banks, and the piling of unequal burdens on the poor, the under-educated and those young people who made the terrible mistake of being born into families without inherited wealth. We should have coped. We might still cope, if – and I accept these are two huge ifs – Labour can win the next election and commit itself to a significant redistribution of wealth and power rather than the tricks and gimmicks that characterised its last period in office.