One of the most heartbreaking scenes in Ken Loach’s austerity tear-jerker I, Daniel Blake is where young mum Katie Morgan is forced to use a food bank. She is met by kindness and understanding from the food bank volunteers, a marked difference from the Job Centre staff who sanctioned her for being a few minutes late, in a new city, with two young children to feed. After putting a few items in a bag, Katie tears open a tin of baked beans, scoops them out with her hand and eats them cold, shaking and white-faced. She has been denying herself meals in order to keep her children fed. She is starving.

I, Daniel Blake might be fictional, but it is created from the testimonies of real benefit claimants and those working inside the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP). It’s estimated that four million people in the UK are currently going hungry due to low wages, inflated utility prices and punitive welfare sanctions. This figure includes 500,000 young children.

In a recent interview with Vogue, our Prime Minister Theresa May was asked what her superpower would be if she had one. She responded: “I think I’d want to make sure that everyone in the world had access to clean water and sufficient food so that we didn’t see people starving.”

The blatant hypocrisy in May’s answer is staggering. She is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. She doesn’t need a comic book “superpower” to ensure that people have enough food to eat – she could introduce policies that would reverse the effects of Tory austerity that have led to widespread hunger in her own country. She could move to scrap the hated Bedroom Tax and unfair benefit sanctions that are applied to claimants for a myriad of petty offences.

We cannot forget that it is the decision to impose austerity that has caused so much suffering and distress for Britain’s most vulnerable people. Despite what the Conservative government would have us believe, the cuts imposed on welfare and local services were ideological, not inevitable.

Theresa May pledges prosperity to whole of UK

Job Centres can strip claimants of their only source of income for weeks on end for being late or missing appointments, even in the case of falling seriously ill and being hospitalised or the death of a loved one. Cruel sanctions are applied to those with learning difficulties for failing to fill out forms correctly or for those an advisor feels “hasn’t done enough to look for work”. Numerous documents have been released detailing how DWP staff are encouraged to sanction a certain quota of people, risking losing out on annual benefits if they do not.

The Trussell Trust is the largest provider of foodbank services in the UK, and states that the primary causes of referrals to their services are benefit delays (27.95 per cent) and low income (23.31 per cent). Other causes include debt, homelessness, domestic violence, sickness and unemployment. In the 2015-16 financial year, the Trussell Trust reported that they distributed more than 1.1 million parcels of food meant to last for three days, and that more than a third of the aid distributed went to children.

The ex-soldier and diabetic David Clapson died hungry and penniless in Stevenage, Herts, in 2014 after having his benefits sanctioned. Mark Wood, a man with complex mental health problems, starved to death four months after his benefits were stopped in Bampton, Oxfordshire in 2013. He was found “fit to work” by the DWP, despite his doctor’s categorical assertion that he was "extremely unwell and absolutely unfit for any work whatsoever".

The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address Show all 6 1 /6 The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address Brexit The big one. Theresa May has spoken publicly three times since declaring her intent to stand in the Tory Leadership race, and each time she has said, ‘Brexit means Brexit.’ It sounds resolute, but it is helpful to her that Brexit is a made up word with no real meaning. She has said there will be ‘no second referendum’ and no re-entry in to the EU via the back door. But she, like the Leave campaign of which she was not a member, has pointedly not said with any precision what she thinks Brexit means Reuters The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address General election This is very much one to keep off the to do list. She said last week there would be ‘no general election’ at this time of great instability. But there have already been calls for one from opposition parties. The Fixed Term Parliaments Act of 2010 makes it far more difficult to call a snap general election, a difficulty she will be in no rush to overcome. In the event of a victory for Leadsom, who was not popular with her own parliamentary colleagues, an election might have been required, but May has the overwhelming backing of the parliamentary party Getty The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address HS2 Macbeth has been quoted far too much in recent weeks, but it will be up to May to decide whether, with regard to the new high speed train link between London, Birmingham, the East Midlands and the north, ‘returning were as tedious as go o’er.’ Billions have already been spent. But the £55bn it will cost, at a bare minimum, must now be considered against the grim reality of significantly diminished public finances in the short to medium term at least. It is not scheduled to be completed until 2033, by which point it is not completely unreasonable to imagine a massive, driverless car-led transport revolution having rendered it redundant EPA The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address Heathrow expansion Or indeed Gatwick expansion. Or Boris Island, though that option is seems as finished as the man himself. The decision on where to expand aviation capacity in the south east has been delayed to the point of becoming a national embarrassment. A final decision was due in autumn. Whatever is decided, there will be vast opprobrium PA The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address Trident renewal David Cameron indicated two days ago that there will be a Commons vote on renewing Britain’s nuclear deterrent on July 18th, by which point we now know, Ms May will be Prime Minister. The Labour Party is, to put it mildly, divided on the issue. This will be an early opportunity to maximise their embarrassment, and return to Tory business as usual EPA The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address Scottish Independence Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP are in no doubt that the Brexit vote provides the opportunity for a second independence referendum, in which they can emerge victorious. The Scottish Parliament at Holyrood has the authority to call a second referendum, but Ms May and the British Parliament are by no means automatically compelled to accept the result. She could argue it was settled in 2014 AFP/Getty

It seems grotesque in the extreme that in one of the world’s wealthiest and most developed countries, people are starving on the Government’s watch and due to their policies. Theresa May is arguably the most powerful woman in the UK, and to say “I want to end hunger” in a fashion magazine interview while ignoring the millions of food insecure people in her own country is a grave insult to the people who have died due to DWP decisions and their families.

It’s an insult to those scraping to get by, those who are chronically ill, disabled, struggling to raise children, working more than one job in an effort to make ends meet and still not quite managing it. It’s an insult to the whole of Britain.