DISCIPLES of the legendary horny devil Baphomet appear to have been taking instruction from the Department for Work and Pensions in the dark arts. The old goat featured recently in a lawsuit brought by the Satanic Temple against Warner Bros and Netflix over his image rights. The Satanists were bereft after the studio giants used a rather vivid depiction of the winged deity in four episodes of the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. This wasn’t any old depiction of Baphomet; it was their depiction.

Pleasingly for the Satanists, an amicable out-of-court settlement has been reached with the Hollywood moguls. In a statement The Satanic Temple addressed some wretched misconceptions about its purpose on God’s earth, insisting that it strived “to encourage benevolence and empathy among all people”. I discern the work of the DWP here. Have they been moonlighting in this febrile End of Days pre-Brexit period to keep the wolf (not to mention the goat) from the door?

This was the DWP’s response to the recent report by Professor Philip Alston, the UN expert in extreme poverty into the consequences of austerity. It seemed to suggest that Professor Alston had overlooked the essential humanity at the heart of the UK’s benefits regime and how it’s turning people’s lives around. Just like the victimised Satanists the DWP feels we’ve all got the wrong end of the stick. “We completely disagree with this analysis,” a DWP spokeswoman said. For the purposes of legal probity, I should add here that no-one is inferring the Satanists like to harry poor people; avoid their taxes or supply rocket-launchers to the House of Saud.

The lady at the DWP added that that there were one million fewer people living in “absolute poverty” compared with eight years ago. I was immediately reminded of The Four Yorkshiremen Sketch by Monty Python. “Cardboard box? You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank.”

The Tories feel the UN has previous when it comes to analysing poverty and inequality. This is an admirable organisation when it organises aid convoys for the relief of starving African children. What business do they have poking their noses around here and causing trouble with their negative vibes? Have they run out of war-torn, sub-Saharan military dictatorships to fret over?

In 2014 another of the UN’s busybody raconteurs attracted the opprobrium of the Tories when she criticised the effects of their bedroom tax. Raquel Rolnik, an internationally acclaimed expert in urban planning, said the UK Government was undermining our basic human right to adequate housing by forcing tenants with spare rooms to pay more rent or move somewhere smaller. The Tories immediately rounded on her, condemning her report as a “misleading Marxist diatribe” and making an official complaint about her to the UN.

Some perspective is required here: there are elements among our Tories who would deem crossing the road before the green man appears as an act of Marxist sedition. In 2016 the UN’s Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights decreed that the Tories’ austerity measures and social security reforms breached their obligations to human rights. It cited the proliferation of food-banks, unemployment rates; the crisis in affordable housing and mental health care, and discrimination against migrants. Last year the UN expressed concern about how funding cuts by the UK Government have eroded the rights of disabled people.

Very little of what the UN has reported on how the UK Government behaves towards its most vulnerable citizens is new. Reports of how benefit claimants and disabled people have been driven to suicide over sanctions and delays in receiving their money are a routine fixture in the daily news cycle. The Government’s main strategy in the Jeremy Corbyn era is to ensure, with the help of the right-wing press and its Blairite lickspittles north and south of the border, that he is persistently depicted as a satanic entity (winged or not).

When your persistent critic is the world’s leading inter-governmental organisation seeking to promote global peace and security it becomes a little more difficult to develop a trumped-up charge: best then simply to dismiss it as Marxist. Nor does it help when the UN Raconteur deploys the sort of language that leaves little room for any misunderstanding. The UK Government was “in denial” about poverty, Professor Alston said. He said that what had greeted him on his 12-day tour was widespread “misery” and that levels of child poverty were “staggering”. He gathered information from those directly affected by the Tories’ austerity programme and cited the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s numbers to say that 1.5m people were destitute at some point in 2017 and that 14m were living in poverty. The Government in its scattergun response seemed to suggest that mere poverty was a jolly decent result and that you had to be in absolute poverty before it would respond. He said that poverty in the UK is a political choice of this Government.

The accusation that a government has deliberately connived at maintaining extreme poverty rather than it being an unfortunate byproduct of tough choices is an astonishing one. Every now and then, though, little clues pointing to this underlying agenda become apparent. One of these occurred in the budget when Philip Hammond chose to grant more tax cuts for the UK’s most affluent citizens even as his Government was elsewhere striving to embed its iniquitous Universal Credit project into the lives of the country’s most deprived citizens.

They have dehumanised these people by portraying them as dishonest and workshy and tasking the press barons with whom they shared a dormitory at Eton to advance the lie. In this way they are better able to drive a wedge between good and diligent working-class people and those whom they consider to be a disgrace to their class. Having softened them up successfully in this manner it was then easy to sell Gordon Brown’s old lie of “British jobs for British workers” which formed the bedrock of the great Brexit confidence trick.