Which image do you think best represents the state of modern Britain? If a recent article from the New York Times is anything to go by, it might well be the food bank. On Sunday, the NYT published a gloomy piece entitled Why British Life Expectancy Has Stalled, crowned with a big photograph of a food bank in Hartlepool. There is nothing green or pleasant about the country depicted in the story, which notes that “for the first time in modern history, Britons in some areas are living shorter lives” and dying more “deaths of despair”. It doesn’t mince words in identifying the reasons; it points the finger at austerity.

The fact that Britain has been broken by a devastating decade of government cuts isn’t exactly news. However, it is always instructive to see how you are viewed by outside eyes and it is sobering to observe just how grim the view of Britain from America has become. This country is more than just a laughing stock, it’s an object of abject pity.

Looking at international coverage of Britain can also bring home the extent to which the Conservatives have hijacked the very soul of the country. In a 2018 article, for example, the NYT lamented, “For a nation with a storied history of public largess, the protracted campaign of budget-cutting … has delivered a monumental shift in British life.” I’m not sure you always appreciate that “storied history of public largess” when you live in the UK. Indeed, it was only when I moved to New York, almost a decade ago, that I understood how much I had taken Britain’s public services for granted. It wasn’t just institutions such as the NHS that I took for granted, it was the values behind them. The idea that being poor shouldn’t be a death sentence. The idea that museums should be free because culture is for everyone. Britain’s public services are what have made me most proud to be British. I have always smugly contrasted the values that underpin them with America’s rampant individualism.

The Britain I have always been proud of – my entire concept of “Britishness” – is vanishing now. Not just because of Brexit but because, as the NYT pointed out in its 2018 article on austerity, after years of budget cutting “Britain is looking less like the rest of Europe and more like the United States”. Politicians have spent the last decade privatising Britain and turning it into a smaller, grubbier version of America. With Boris Johnson in power, we even have our own pound-shop Trump.

Perhaps most sobering about the NYT’s coverage of Austerity Britain (the paper has run a series on “Britain’s Big Squeeze”) is that a US paper is far more honest about the effects of government cuts than many of our politicians. As the United Nations poverty envoy (who happens to be Australian) noted last year, the Tory government is in a state of denial about the devastating impact of their policies. Indeed, earlier this year Amber Rudd responded to the UN’s damning report on austerity with more denial – calling it a “barely believable documentation of Britain” and saying, “The UK is one of the happiest places in the world to live.”

Conservatives may be deluding themselves about the state of the country, but you only have to glance at international newspapers to see that they are not fooling anyone else.

• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist