In straitened and uncertain times, people look for bogeymen. Eurocrats and immigrant workers are usually the first against the wall but there’s another chunk of society quietly being singled out for a more sinister denunciation. Be careful everybody — in today’s Britain, woe betide you if you’re on welfare.

It’s now a rite of passage for any aspiring political leader to state that he or she is keen to cut the welfare budget; it’s a mantra as regular as putting a penny on tobacco or vowing to protect the NHS. That’s why it drew no real howls of outrage when George Osborne got up at his party conference last month and declared that to cut the deficit further he needed to find another £25 billion of savings, and that he’d get them from cuts to welfare. You don’t have to be a Harvard-trained economist to know that the last people to have a spare £25 billion sloshing around are the poor. Yet no one seemed that bothered by the Chancellor’s economics.

Similarly Ed Miliband, who has spent the past few years putting his party through intensive social policy reviews, seems to be restricting his public pronouncements to “tough” decisions to limit child support payments and to put a cap on welfare spending.

There’s nothing “tough” about kicking someone when they’re down. In fact, it appears to be the easiest job in British politics. So, even though benefit fraud itself is dwarfed thirtyfold by annual tax fraud by companies and individuals, headlines express more contempt for the shirker than the City’s creative accountants and financial experts who caused the economic crisis in the first place. There are no poster campaigns asking us to snoop on tax fraudsters; but it’s become a common trope in any portrayal of benefit culture that it’s peopled entirely by women banging out babies to get better housing, and men claiming sickness benefit while out ten-pin bowling.

The true picture is a much more sobering one: it’s of an increasing section of society working or trying to find work while living within touching distance of poverty. We may be through the worst of the Great Recession but many have had to drop down in pay level, endure frozen salaries, move to find work at great personal cost, or take themselves off the unemployment register by entering the fickle world of self-employment. This weekend’s figures that show there are now a record 5.2 million workers in low-paid jobs point to a significant section of the community being pushed to the margins.

Meantime, those claiming benefit are evaluated by firms such as Atos and Maximus, charged with keeping welfare costs down. Claimants are subjected to an undignified, demoralising series of tests and conditions which, if flouted, result in a sanction, an automatic suspension of payment.

Fair enough, you might think, were it not that these firms are under pressure to hit targets. There are thousands of examples of claimants sanctioned for missing interviews when they’re incapacitated, or in hospital, or receiving notice of the date after the event, or being sent it online even if they’ve said they don’t have wi-fi.

For the Orwellian reality of sanctions, see Owen Jones’s new book, The Establishment, and Mary O’Hara’s report, Austerity Bites, to grasp their pervasive and destructive legacy. You can appeal against a sanction, in case you’re wondering, but the process can take six months, and benefits stay suspended for the whole of that time.

Even claiming disability benefit draws suspicious looks. The suggestion by welfare reform minister Lord Freud that certain disabled people were not worth the minimum wage can only reinforce a current unspoken prejudice against disabled claimants. There are more and more accounts of people in wheelchairs receiving verbal abuse and worse on the streets.

We are now in the middle of a shocking rise in poverty in all its forms, most shocking of all being hunger. Since 2012 both Save the Children and the Red Cross, institutions set up to provide charity overseas, have been busy working in Britain. Meanwhile, the number of food banks has grown tenfold in the past four years, with around 1,400 food bank centres distributing food around the UK.

The experiences of volunteers there are not of dealing with skivers or cheats, but with vulnerable people whose dignity has been washed out of them by austerity and who are embarrassed by their situation. Some come admitting they skip evening meals so they have enough to feed their children. Some are children bringing fathers or mothers who are too proud to make the trip on their own. Many are working, sometimes with two jobs, but on low pay.

This is not some Victorian workhouse scheme for a destitute underclass: this is us, this is people we know, our family, friends, colleagues, neighbours. This is a Britain that seems more like America, where the absence of a safety net has led to a fragmented society and polarised politics. There is now a huge section of society that Westminster has chosen to leave behind.

For the past decade the main political parties have seen a collapse in their percentage share of the vote. Forecasts for the 2015 election indicate this trend is going to accelerate. In panic, mainstream politics has gone into retreat, reassuring core voters but unwilling to connect with anyone at the margins who is unlikely to vote.

I’ve had one senior Labour shadow minister tell me that, if you’ve got a choice between canvassing students or old folk’s homes, you visit the pensioners, since they’ll vote. Hence, students get tuition fees while Osborne in his conference speech assured pensioners they’ll be protected from cuts.

This narrowing political vision affects us all. Economically, it’s a pitiful plan for anyone hoping to increase the country’s income tax revenues. Socially, there can be no hope of cohesion in our communities if politics is now By Special Invitation Only.