You can tell a lot about a person by their priorities. It’s true with friends – say, the mate who ditches your birthday drinks for a date – but take a look at British politics, and it’s increasingly the case with ministers, or even the country.

This week, the Social Metrics Commission released findings that reveal a national poverty crisis. More than 4 million people in the UK are trapped in what the researchers describe as “deep poverty”, meaning their income is at least 50% below the official breadline, locking them into a weekly struggle to afford the basics of life. Seven million people, including 2.3 million children, are affected by what it termed “persistent poverty” – people who are not only enduring poverty now, but who have lived in poverty for at least two of the previous three years.

For the country, it means rolling back the clock. Researchers say the sweeping cuts to tax credits and benefits we’ve seen over the last 10 years are reversing two decades of anti-poverty policy. For families, it means toast for tea and payday loans to pay the electricity bill.

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson’s government has announced plans to set aside an extra £2.1bn for no-deal preparations including stockpiling of medicines, an extra 500 border officials and information for businesses. This takes the total allocation of spending on no-deal preparation this year alone up to £6.3bn, in the political equivalent of hitting yourself in the face and paying someone to patch up your broken nose. Experts are already warning that this will divert government spending from departments in need – needs that are all the more pressing after a decade of services starved of cash.

Still, Johnson has found cash for a no-deal Brexit information “blitz”, in what the Telegraph are calling the “biggest ad campaign since the second world war”. A mere £100m will go on TV ads and information leaflets that will be sent to 27 million households. Welcome to the land of warped priority, where there is no money to help you escape poverty, but tens of millions can be found for leaflets to prepare for a no-deal Brexit that will make you even poorer.

‘From Osbornomics to Theresa May’s ‘magic money tree’, Conservatives have sold the line that there just isn’t the money to pay for what the country needs. This was always hokum.’ Photograph: Pool/Reuters

Since the onset of Osbornomics, all the way through to Theresa May’s “magic money tree”, Conservatives have sold the line that there just isn’t the money to pay for what the country needs. This was always hokum; even before Johnson loosened the purse strings, the Tories found cash for tax cuts for wealthy families and businesses, even as they were squeezing the poorest and disabled. Johnson’s Brexit spending spree confirms what “no money” really means: there is always money for what – or who – those in power think counts.

This eternal truth is only becoming starker as the Brexit mess deepens. A succession of politicians and parts of the press are peddling the belief that leaving the EU matters at all (literal) cost, while convincing us the real issues are meaningless. If you wanted a microcosm of where we find ourselves, consider the fact that the government has failed to spend more than £3.5m of EU funds intended to alleviate child poverty and homelessness. Despite having the cash for six years, at a time when hundreds of thousands more infants have been pushed below the breadline and rough sleeping has soared, ministers have sat on a fund that could have helped – and in the event of a no-deal Brexit, unspent money may have to be returned.

One of the most damaging myths around poverty has always been that it is somehow inevitable – the idea that while some people enjoy a life of fortune, there will always be others who can’t afford regular meals. This narrative manages to simultaneously blame individuals for their own disadvantage, while absolving governments from their responsibility in helping cause it. Take the report by the work and pensions select committee released this week. It provides yet more evidence of the growth of hardship in this country, with MPs warning how “devastating, cumulative cuts” over the last decade have seen ministers force the poorest to take the burden of “target-busting savings”.

Like the Social Metrics Commission’s findings, the report paints a bleak picture: working parents earning poverty wages, children pushed into hardship, and disabled and ill people left without basic support. But it’s the wilfulness of it all that stands out: families who have no need to be struggling, but who have been pushed there by the people elected to help them. As the committee puts it, the high levels of poverty and destitution we see in the UK are a choice – and “a choice that could be unmade”. Britain’s priorities, grimly, appear to lie elsewhere.

• Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist and author of Crippled: Austerity and the Demonisation of Disabled People