How did we get so fond of blame in the UK? It seems every week we learn of more people – usually vulnerable for one reason or another – who have been systematically picked on over the last decade. And, I am sorry to say, the culprit is all too often the very government meant to protect their interests.

Take the plight of disabled people. In November 2017 a United Nations inquiry found that measures aimed at reducing public spending since 2010 have affected disabled people disproportionately. Indeed, that a range of policies, including controversial changes such as the bedroom tax and cuts to disability benefits and social care budgets, have deeply affected disabled people.

The inquiry noted that disabled people had suffered from a climate in which they were portrayed as 'lazy and putting a burden on taxpayers'. They had continued to experience 'increasing hostility, aggressive behaviour and sometimes attacks to their personal integrity'. In short, that the UK government was guilty of 'systematic violations' of the rights of people with disabilities.

It all feels like a sad decline in our nation’s moral standards. In my youth, the prevailing reaction to disability was sympathy matched by concrete benefits to make already difficult lives easier. Perhaps there was an element of enlightened self-interest lurking in that approach. After all, who can truly guarantee they will be healthy and able bodied all their lives? Accidents, life-changing illness, what Shakespeare dubbed 'the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to' are common. Only a fool believes they are somehow immune.

None of which stopped the government bringing in punitive measures to make disabled people pay a heavy price for the financial crash of 2008.

Nor are they only ones affected by our blame culture when it comes to people accessing the welfare state.

A ground-breaking five year study funded by The Economic and Social Research Council uncovered that using sanctions does not drive unemployed people into finding long-term work, as is widely claimed.

On the contrary, for those people interviewed for the study who did obtain work, the most common outcome was a series of short-term, insecure jobs, interspersed with periods of unemployment, rather than a shift into sustained, well-paid work.

The in-depth study also found that sanctions generally delivered poor outcomes, including debt, poverty and reliance on charities such as food banks. Worse, measures like stopping benefits for families already on the verge of destitution are often imposed for trivial and downright cruel reasons. Anyone doubting this should watch Ken Loach’s film 'I, Daniel Blake'. Not surprisingly, the study concluded that sanctioned individuals frequently experience high levels of stress, anxiety and depression.

As the director of the study, Prof Peter Dwyer of the University of York, put it: “The outcomes from sanctions are almost universally negative”.

So why has the government taken our country down this road since they came to power in 2010? Some argue it is because many senior Conservative politicians are divorced from the lives of ordinary people: millionaires who belong to a world of privilege.

Personally, I believe the answer lies in their desire to maintain a low tax environment for the very wealthy who fund their political party and who, ultimately, they represent. It is also possible blaming the disabled and unemployed for an economic crisis triggered by greed-driven banking practices will divert some people’s attention from the real reasons why Britain has become a low wage economy with poorly-funded public and welfare services.

Of course, ‘divide and rule’ is a tactic deployed by powerful elites since the dawn of time. Nevertheless, it feels a shoddy kind of politics. Nor can it justify humiliating decent people and families. Most of all, we have a duty to remember the four million children living in poverty.

Surely the time has come to stop picking on the most vulnerable in society. Policies lacking fairness and compassion, the best of our British values, demean us all. Perhaps it is time, too, to ask ourselves who really is to blame for the poverty and inequality in Austerity Britain.