In real terms, wages for the worst-off — the section of society I call the Downers — have scarcely increased since the 1970s. To help the working poor support a family, their wages have had to be supplemented by state benefits on a scale previously undreamt of. Meanwhile the level of middle-class pay has purred along, keeping well ahead of inflation, while the pay of top executives has disappeared into the stratosphere. Labour’s introduction of a minimum wage merely prevents the wages of the poor from disappearing in the opposite direction.

Thus, while suffering the daily practical misery of not quite making ends meet, the Downers also have the humiliation of seeing how little the society they live in values their efforts. Their ever-increasing relative poverty entrenches feelings of worthlessness and inferiority. And the Uppers are not too squeamish about rubbing it in. Once we would have thought it indecent to brand people as “losers”. Not any more.

Of course, being poor is not as grinding in material terms as it was even in the 1970s. Then only 37% had central heating; now 92% do. Then only 42% had telephones; now it is 98%.

Yet those hugely welcome material improvements are overshadowed by a cultural impoverishment which haunts the worst estates. In some ways the Downers of today are much worse off than the Downers of the 1970s, or even the 1930s.

Yes, unemployment and physical hardship were all infinitely worse in the 1930s, but there was no social breakdown, very little disorder, and the psychic hurt took the form of injured pride rather than surly demoralisation.

It is tempting for disenchanted modern observers to look back nostalgically to the 1960s and 1970s when the welfare state was still intact and inequality was at its lowest before Margaret Thatcher was elected.

Yet the writer Jeremy Seabrook, who travelled around Britain in those years and produced a book about it (What Went Wrong?), tells us that the demoralisation of the people at the bottom was palpable before Thatcher came to power. Already the early signs were visible — the decay of standards in state schools, the degradation of the worst council estates, the rise of the drug culture.

So if greater economic equality and higher expenditure on public services are part of the answer, they don’t sound like the most important part. Indeed, by everything they say and do, it is clear that the representatives of the left — politicians, think tanks, administrators — no longer see the redistribution of wealth as the prime means of relieving the demoralisation of the poor.

The new conventional wisdom of the left is very different. It is that, by one means or another, the Downers must be coaxed and chivvied, bullied and bribed to behave better.

Loutish families who terrorise council estates are to have antisocial behaviour orders slapped on them. Rowdy schoolchildren are to be excluded from school and sent to special units. Young hoodlums are to be tagged or subjected to curfews. Respectable citizens are to be encouraged to sneak on their neighbours who drink and drive or behave in other offensive and dangerous ways.

All this has a strongly medieval flavour. In the Middle Ages, communal disapproval was an important weapon of social control, in many ways more effective than the then rather sparse official forces of law and order. And public humiliation — such as placing a miscreant in the stocks — was an inexpensive method of punishment.

To revert to such methods now is a remarkable retrogressive step. After all, the whole philosophy of William Beveridge, the “architect” of the welfare state, pointed in the opposite direction. The poor were to be assisted to stand on their own feet, to become sturdy autonomous citizens.