Watch Theresa May scramble in the shadow of no majority and the subsequent paper-thin Queen’s speech and it’s as if government as we know it has been entirely disbanded. While EU negotiations and a costly DUP deal take centre stage (and £1bn of public money) a domestic policy agenda is missing in action.

This would be disturbing at the best of times, but it is happening as Britain teeters on the edge of its worst living-standards crisis in modern politics.

For proof, just look at two stories from the last week alone. More than 1 million households living in private rented accommodation are at risk of becoming homeless by 2020 because of rising rents, benefit freezes and a lack of social housing, new research from Shelter has found. The Tory ideal of a family being able to buy their own home is near fantasy: this study shows that rising numbers of people can’t pay even the lowest available rents to keep a roof over their heads.

Meanwhile the University of Oxford has published the biggest nationwide study on food banks to date – a spotlight on poverty through Britain’s food parcels. It found that four in five Trussell Trust food bank users are severely food insecure: that means skipping meals and going without eating – sometimes for days at a time. Over half couldn’t afford heating or toiletries. One in five had slept rough in the last year. The Trussell Trust calls this “multiple forms of destitution”: where a person can’t afford deodorant, a hot meal, or the rent.

I could think of a few other terms: perhaps a stain on the national conscious. That stain gets darker still when we see the people behind the figures. Three-quarters are suffering from ill health, or live with someone who does. A third are affected by mental health problems. Over half are disabled, or share a home with someone who is.

“I can make a meal out of a tin of beans. Sometimes there’s not a lot in the cupboard, you know?” Richard, 57, explains from his one-bed flat in Kingston upon Thames. Richard has a degenerative spinal disease as well as arthritis and breathing problems: a walking frame is his only way to move around the flat, and he needs a ventilator at night. It’s been over a decade since he was well enough to work – as a stager fitter and then a chauffeur – and his only income is disability living allowance. His wife is a nurse but with no pay NHS rise in years, in Richard’s words, the two of them are “absolutely broke”.

Richard has gum problems but he can’t afford a dentist. The rent on the flat alone sets them back £1,100 a month. It’s one of eight crammed into a converted Victorian house. The walls are so thin, Richard explains, that they can hear their neighbours’ conversations at night. “I paid £35 a week in my teens round here,” Richard tells me. “Nowadays, people just think of a number and double it.”

After rent, council tax, gas and electric, there’s not much left for food. Richard stretches the basics: mince, potatoes, beans and toast, and a box of tomatoes from the local market. “I’ve turned into a good cook,” he says, with a small laugh. Last November, they went to the local food bank – “lovely people”, Richard says – after another evening with nothing in the kitchen. They haven’t been back since: Richard says he’s too embarrassed. “My wife didn’t like to, you know. Pride,” he adds. “But I know we might need to again … It was nice to know someone cares.”

When food banks first started to spread across Britain, there was rightful outrage that families in one of the richest countries in the world could ever need a charity food parcel. But the new scandal is that often food poverty is no longer a one-off emergency but rather a long-term way of living: eating cereal for dinner one week and then, next month, doing it again.

Chronic hunger is the painful product of an era in which a full-time nurse – let alone someone stuck on a zero-hours contract, or who is too ill to work – has to battle between rent, food, and bills. Grimly, Oxford University found that the average income of families in the month before using a food bank is £320. Some had no income at all.

“It is sometimes scoffed at, but the fact is, there is much greater awareness of food banks than was the case previously,” the new welfare and pensions secretary, David Gauke, remarked last week when asked about the rise in food bank use. Gauke was announcing that the benefit freeze would remain in place despite rising food prices. With little sense of irony, he did it over a lobby lunch.

As the details of the Tories’ deal with the DUP comes out, this sort of policy and rhetoric is going to become increasingly unpalatable to the public. The message from May is clear: there’s no money to ease the suffering of people going to food banks or losing their homes but plenty to keep herself and her party in power.

In the coming months, Jeremy Corbyn – ever more comfortable in his role – can continue to present Labour as the only party willing to help families get a decent standard of living. May and ministers can pretend it is business as usual all they like. There is no starker sign of a government’s decline than when it becomes normal for its citizens to go hungry.