This past February, toward the tail end of a frigid winter, London’s Westminster City Council announced that it was calling upon its wealthier residents to do more to assist their less fortunate neighbors. The council encompasses some of the most expensive real estate in the country and is one of only nine of London’s thirty-three boroughs to be controlled by the Conservative Party. The measure, which was characterized by the council as a “community contribution” and swiftly called a “guilt tax” by the press, called upon the residents of almost sixteen thousand houses or flats to voluntarily double the amount of tax due on their homes—an extra contribution of eight hundred and thirty-three pounds, or just more than a thousand dollars per annum. Nickie Aiken, the leader of the council, said that the idea had come out of conversations with the area’s more affluent residents, who had expressed their eagerness to pay more than what was officially required by the council, which prides itself on having some of the lowest property taxes in the country. The decision “reflects the kind and generous spirit of Westminster residents,” Aiken said at the time, adding that “the scheme is most popular among residents of the most expensive homes.” The proceeds would be targeted for three specific areas: youth groups, resources for the elderly and lonely, and assistance for the burgeoning number of Londoners sleeping rough on the city’s streets.

These are all areas where public spending has been slashed over the past eight years, thanks to a national fiscal policy of austerity first implemented by the Conservative leadership of the government in 2010, in response to the financial downturn that began in 2007. Spending on recreation centers, libraries, and services to the elderly and disabled has been dramatically cut back. At the same time, welfare benefits have been restructured, with supplementary benefits for housing or childcare being replaced by what is known as “Universal Credit.” The new system, intended to simplify the distribution of benefits, has, its critics allege, actually caused additional hardship to its recipients—not least because the program has built in a five-week delay between the filing of a claim and the payment of any benefits, sometimes propelling those with the fewest resources into debt or rent arrears, and, as has been widely reported, forcing some to resort to sex work.

Last week, a scourging indictment of Britain’s austerity policies was issued by Philip Alston, the special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights for the United Nations, who spent two weeks in the U.K. assessing the effects of the government’s efforts to curb public spending. In a lengthy report, Alston notes that the government’s claims about the effectiveness of austerity were contradicted by evidence on a wide range of indices. Local authorities have cut spending on services by almost twenty per cent, resulting in the closure of children’s centers and youth clubs that might protect vulnerable young people against recruitment into gangs. The rate of homelessness in England has increased sixty per cent since 2010, and the number of rough sleepers has increased a hundred and thirty-four per cent. The proportion of people relying upon food banks has increased dramatically. There are now two thousand food banks in the U.K., in many cases serving people who are employed but still can’t make ends meet: Alston reports that almost sixty per cent of people who are living in poverty in the U.K. are members of working families. Children in the U.K. have been hit especially hard by a policy that limits child-benefit payments to two children per family. There is an exception, which Alston justly characterizes as “outrageous,” for any children who are born as a result of their mother having been raped—a circumstance she must prove to the government before receiving any additional benefits.

Even before Alston issued his report, his visit was condemned by some: “What right does the UN have to tell us what to do in our own country?” was the headline in one column in the Telegraph newspaper. But the analysis was welcomed elsewhere. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which works to combat poverty in the U.K., issued a statement saying that the government “needs to read the rapporteur’s report and act on it now, bringing the country together to build the just and compassionate society we all want to be a part of.” The assumption that everyone in the U.K. is on the same page as far as justice and compassion are concerned was, however, one of the issues raised in the report itself. Alston takes great care to point out that, while Britain’s austerity measures are typically discussed within the framework of fiscal prudence, another motive is at work. “In the area of poverty-related policy, the evidence points to the conclusion that the driving force has not been economic but rather a commitment to achieving radical social engineering,” he writes.

The foundational principles established by Sir William Beveridge in his report on poverty, in 1942, which led to the creation of Britain’s welfare state in the postwar period—that society should be structured for the benefit of the many, and that the state should provide a safety net for the vulnerable—are being radically revised. “British compassion for those who are suffering has been replaced by a punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous approach apparently designed to instill discipline where it is least useful, to impose a rigid order on the lives of those least capable of coping with today’s world, and elevating the goal of enforcing blind compliance over a genuine concern to improve the well-being of those at the lowest level of British society,” Alston asserts.

That there might be a dimension of moral judgment, not just economic prudence, underlying the government’s austerity policy is hardly news. Politicians have made a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor since at least the nineteenth century, and the existence of the former has not diminished the benighted persistence of the latter, at least according to critics of a more progressive approach to welfare policy. “The government has made no secret of its determination to change the value system to focus more on individual responsibility,” as the special rapporteur remarks in his report. The Universal Credit regulations about family benefits suggest that the Department for Work and Pensions is more concerned with policing the behavior of its recipients—such as those women who dare to have more than two children—than it is with alleviating their distress. And the delay in payment of benefits, Alston notes sharply, seems intended to “make clear that being on benefits should involve hardship.”

In the light of this, one might wonder: How dutifully are the wealthy, with all their inherent advantages, holding up their end of the seigneurial bargain? If so much emphasis is to be placed upon the individual responsibility of the poor, what observations might be made regarding the collective responsibility of the rich? On the evidence of Westminster’s guilt tax, the latter is as lacking as is, according to the Conservative government, the former. To date, the scheme in Westminster has raised four hundred thousand pounds, which is being spent on grants for job training, programs to combat loneliness, and an initiative to fund two ex-rough-sleeping “buddies” to help people living on the streets who “may be distrustful of mainstream authority,” in the words of a statement from the council. That’s hundreds of thousands of dollars that wouldn’t otherwise have made it to the public coffers, which is all to the good, if hardly sufficient to compensate for the cuts instituted from above.