The Tories have created a new poverty — one so deep and vicious it requires Victorian vocabulary

'Destitute’ means a living standard so sparse, it should be consigned to history. It now applies to four million in Britain, writes Frances Ryan

Such are the levels of destitution now in Britain that it is beginning to echo the extreme poverty as experienced by Victorian street kids, seen here in this engraving after a drawing by Dorothy Tennant (1855-1926).

It starts slowly at first. A food bank crops up inside your local mosque. You notice more sleeping bags on the walk to work. Over time, the signs seem to grow. A donation bin appears in Tesco for families who can’t afford soap or toothpaste. Terms such as “bed poverty” emerge in the news because we now need vocabulary to describe children who are so poor that they have to sleep on the floor.

Then one day you read a statistic that somehow feels both shocking and wearily unsurprising: about 3.8m people experienced destitution in Britain last year. That’s the equivalent of almost half the population of London being unable to meet their most basic needs to stay warm, dry, clean, and fed.