I would rather not think about poverty while I am being presented with gift guides in which the smallest “stocking filler” is £15: it may well be a tad unfestive. The cheerleading for Christmas this year has become a form of “self-care”. “It has been a hard year, so treat yourself.” (“Oh, go on then …”) The managing are coercing the “just about managing”. In these new social divisions, I am not sure what the “not managing at all” are called. Let’s stick with poor. The poor are always with us, but poverty itself goes through changes – changes that are not reflected in the way we speak about it.

A new report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation highlights the rise of the working poor. The political tactic to justify monstering the welfare state using rhetoric around poverty being largely the result of unemployment or “skiving” has been largely successful. But that narrative is falling apart. The number of workers living in poverty (counted as having below 60% of median income) is larger than it has ever been. One in eight workers – 3.8 million people – live in poverty. They work, often in more than one job, but wages are low and rents are high. In London and the south-east, rents often account for a third of income. Working-age benefits have been cut. Many people now live in extreme financial difficulty. Those with disabilities have borne the brunt of this onslaught. Women are worse off than men.

Much of what has happened in the name of austerity has been well documented. But this is not just about cuts. We have a crisis of pay. And of housing. Decent wages and affordable homes are but a dream for many. But failure to live the dream is so often experienced as individual failure. A culture that tells people that work is the way out of deprivation cannot explain the current deprivation. It locates it elsewhere: Europe, immigration, globalisation.

This deprivation, however, is a choice. We need to be clear who has made it. Has the mother skipping meals, living in damp accommodation, eventually costing the NHS because of illness, made a choice to be poor? Have the young people living at home with their parents, unable to be independent, made that choice? Have the breadwinners of “hard-working families” chosen not to have a pay rise for 10 years?

No. Everyone has a degree of agency – I don’t wish to take this away – but the continual portrayal of poverty as an individual choice is untenable now. However hard some people are working, they are trapped.

The choice was made long ago by the Tories and Labour that inequality is a price worth paying for growth. The richer would get richer. But so would the poor, somehow. Boom, boom, boom. This is the lie that was told. The sight of David Cameron cheered to the rafters when he left the Commons, the front man for George Osborne’s idiotic and cruel “rebalancing” of the economy, turned my stomach.

But, sadly, there is no point in denying that, as an imaginative project, the idea that we must embrace austerity worked. Wherever you go now, people parrot the “tightening our belts” story. It has become internalised. The state must be shrunk. Everyone should work harder. In this vision, the only “innocent” poor are the disabled and children – and yet the disabled and the dying, as we know, are still expected somehow to earn.

When work does not provide living wages, though, the narrative can be challenged. This is still fraught as poverty often feels personal, and shameful. It is both mind-numbingly boring and deeply stressful never to foresee a different future. The promise of “recovery” is a fantasy for most people. The impulse to blame the EU is not entirely wrong. As a whole, Europe has not invested in infrastructure, it has pursued austerity to the detriment of younger generations. No, we don’t have the youth unemployment of Spain or Italy, but the life chances of younger people in the UK have been severely limited.

Of all the identity politics spoken about in the wake of Brexit, and indeed the Trump victory, the fact that these are the choices of middle-aged and older voters is significant. The relationship of stagnation to gender, racial or generational divides is too often spoken about in the abstract. In reality, women live with men, children with adults, people who were born here live with people who weren’t. We are interdependent, not isolated economic units, and thus poverty is not reducible to an identity. Except from the outside. To see the poor as workers – for whom work is failing – is a way to move this forward. It is a way to identify collectively rather than sustain the limbo in which many currently live, where failure to provide is personally embarrassing, emasculating, depressing. Too often, accounts of modern poverty are simply dismissed or not believed. Actual starvation is required.

It as if we don’t live in one of the richest countries in the world – because that is the main point of highlighting this degree of poverty. This level of inequality is a deliberate political choice. It is not an inexplicable byproduct of some economic weather. It is what consecutive governments have signed up to. The political shaming and blaming of the poor for their own circumstances, their bad choices, masks an abject moral failure. When employment is not a way out of poverty, what is? The lotto?