With the renewed attack on welfare by the Conservative party, poverty increases. Yet people have become reluctant to acknowledge that they are poor. This has been brought home forcefully to me in the West Midlands. “I’m ashamed I can’t provide for my children.” “I don’t like people seeing me go to the food bank.” “I feel I’m doing something wrong.” “I find myself apologising all the time.” “Falling into debt is like drowning.” “I’m humiliated waiting for items that have reached their sell-by date.”

Shame is the most persistent attribute of contemporary poverty. This is a relatively new development since poor people have traditionally been proud, dignified, stoical; they have showed solidarity, even defiance, facing the condition of being poor. Why should shame be the particular inflection of poverty in this late enlightened age?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines shame as “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behaviour”. The operative word in this context is “consciousness”. They have become aware of their own bad conduct or faulty actions. And this is precisely what the government intends people to experience, since punitive policies enhance a sense of guilt. It seems the poor have internalised the assessment of – who? Their betters, the rich, legislators, moralists? – and are ready to accept responsibility for what has, through the ages, been seen as a visitation by chance, fate, even God, but not necessarily, at least until the industrial era, as evidence of their own failings.

How has this ideological fiction passed into everyday acceptance? While the poor remained in the majority, despite being constantly told that poverty was their lot, that it was determined elsewhere than in the social and economic system in which it was located, this view of their condition was fiercely resisted because they knew that no matter how hard they worked and tried to adhere to the values of their society, they could not attain sufficiency for themselves and their dependants.

Direct experience disconfirmed for most of them the sad fable that they were victims of their own folly, idleness or improvidence. Indeed, this was the basis of much of the resistance to capitalism: the idea that we are simply individuals who must make our own private accommodation with wealth and power was vehemently repudiated by those who knew otherwise, and recognised the role of a society that withheld from them the necessities for survival.

The labour movement was founded on just this recognition. Accordingly, the malignant assertion that poverty was a personal failing was negated by the power of people to negotiate collectively for a decent level of living, an honourable livelihood or, in a more ancient formulation, a fair day’s pay for a far day’s work.

No wonder it has been the objective of governments – not all of them avowedly reactionary or Conservative; indeed the Labour party, sometime defenders of the poor, has abandoned them in search of elusive majorities among squeezed middles and hard-working families – to weaken the power of collective resistance, to undermine institutions created by the poor for self-defence. This task has been assisted in recent decades by a spectacular rise in prosperity. The advent of consumer society was accompanied by a profound psychological change in poor people, which predisposed them more readily to accept a proposition they had previously resented and rejected.

When the good times came – in the 1950s and 1960s especially – most were swift to accept personal responsibility for this happy development. They were content to link growing affluence with their own merit: just rewards were at last conceded to those working in industries that were fast disappearing. Such rewards might be taken as a retrospective recompense for past suffering, want and exploitation. People were complicit in seeing the better times as a consequence of their own hard work, thrift and husbandry. They did so under a cacophony of hymns to commodities, paeans of praise to goods and services, hosannas to market freedoms, and to a disorientingly dazzling embarrassment of riches in the display windows of the world.

In such a context, the corollary was that those who neglected to take advantage of the ubiquitous abundance must be suffering from some moral defect. So eager was capitalism to pour its riches into our lap that you would have to be very incompetent indeed not to take advantage of its pressing desire to help you to the good life.

In this environment, belief that the poor were culpable found new listeners and eager converts; particularly when the poor could so readily be assimilated to many other social groups – drug addicts, alcoholics, deviants, thugs, vandals, yobs, scroungers, spongers, parasites and all the other moral outlaws of plenty, obligingly brought to our attention by the friends of the people in the popular press.

So it is that the majority, the no longer poor, now turn against those who have not availed themselves of all that capitalism innocently wishes to shower upon them; and under the barrage of resentment and loathing this incapacity incurs, is it any wonder that poor people faithfully echo the dominant view of their condition? Since they are now a minority – although substantial – they no longer pose any electoral threat to the wellbeing of the rest and can be treated with the punitive disdain they now deserve.

Shame, then, is the measure of acceptance by the poor of their own responsibility for their outcast state. Deprived, impoverished, non-participants in the epic party-time that is too-late capitalism, they seek to conceal themselves, hide their wounds, dissimulate their shabbiness and ill-nourishment. At the same time, they afford the well-to-do an opportunity for self-righteous defamation – a practice of which right-thinking majorities are not slow to take conspicuous advantage.