What a great business banking is, it’s boom time all round. The nation’s biggest banks are raking in bumper profits, thanks to the Bank of England jacking up our interest rates. Lloyds made nearly £7 billion before taxes, and NatWest £5.1bn, that’s up 33%, the highest take since banks crashed the global economy in 2008, driving millions into poverty.

It’s also boom time for those other banks, food banks, now we come to mention poverty. The Trussell Trust, Britain’s biggest food bank, currently hands out 73,424 meals daily. Hedge funds must be aching for a slice of that kind of growth. Food banks were basically unknown in 2010 when the Tories took power. Back then the Trussell Trust had just 35 food banks nationwide. By 2020, it was 1,300. In 2010, the Trussell Trust gave out 61,000 food parcels. By 2014, nearly one million. Come 2020, it was just under two million. Today it’s almost three million. Super soaraway or what?

Read more: The anti-woke hysteria of the right-wing is at brain-rotting levels

Food banks now have a rival, though. Britain, ever the innovator, today boasts a new kid on the poverty block: warm banks, where the freezing go to survive. More than 500,000 people visited a warm bank this winter.

Bankers have no trouble sticking their noses into the matter of poverty. Well, they’ve no trouble sticking their noses into any trough available, so why not dispense with all shame and pontificate to the poor?

Huw Pill, the Bank of England’s chief economist and a man exceptionally well-fed and toasty warm, thinks greedy Brits need to put up and shut up. Pill, who earns £190,000 annually, says the plebs should just “accept they’re worse off” and stop demanding pay rises. I mean, the cheek of the working class: wanting to feed their kids and turn the heating on.

Pill is a former Goldman Sachs banker, with a £1.5 million London pad. He reports to the Bank of England deputy governor, Ben Broadbent, also ex-Goldman Sachs. That’s the same bank Rishi Sunak worked for, when he was but a humble millionaire instead of one of Britain’s richest men.

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Goldman Sachs, dubbed “the great vampire squid”, was up to its neck in the 2008 crash. But never mind that, the British Government saved the banks and threw the rest of us under the bus. Why cry over spilt milk? The crash only helped Britain tumble down the global ranks for life expectancy. No big deal. The rich are getting richer, that’s what matters – for isn’t that the sign of a healthy country?

 Read more: Scots parents are starving themselves to feed their children

Just look at the energy companies. Centrica, the company which owns British Gas, made record profits of £ 3.3bn. Well done, corporate shareholders. In 2021, Centrica only made a measly £948m in profits. Who says misery doesn’t pay?

How different the meaning of the word "bank" can be, eh, in two separate sets of circumstances? In the city of London, it’s champagne suppers. In the east end of Glasgow, it’s queueing for food from a charity to feed your baby.

We Brits must be either the most calm, stoic souls to ever comprise a nation, or the most stupid, biddable and supine bunch of fools who ever drew collective breath. If this country were France, there would be riots. Banks would have burned to the ground. But in Britannia, we’ve so many pretty squirrels to distract us, courtesy of our billionaire-owned media, that you’d think we still ruled the waves, instead of sinking below them.

Currently, the London media is engaged in a debate about whether or not Britain is run by a "left-wing elite". Apparently, the likes of Gary Lineker and Emily Maitlis head some sort of Illuminati organisation whereby we "think" it’s the Tories and their super-rich donors calling the shots but it’s actually a football pundit and a journalist.

Although, perhaps a footballer and a journalist might make a better stab at evacuating British citizens from war zones. While Italy boasted of leaving “nobody behind”, and Berlin completed its evacuation of German citizens from Sudan, the Tories basically told Brits to make it to Khartoum airport alone. Look, everyone hates that taxi ride for the red eye, but running a cordon of gunmen is maybe pushing perseverance somewhat, no?

Read more: Food banks shut for the Queen, but hunger is not a royalist

The truth is, Britain dreams. We’re like an old dying man, lying on his hospital bed as his pulse flickers and memories of his former glory days play out in his mind. We live in a state of willing truth denial. The UK Government and media say "look, over there, it’s a refugee trying to get into Britain". We look and growl. "Look, a trans person!" We look and growl. "Look, a benefit scrounger". But soon, when you look at the benefit scrounger you might be seeing yourself in the mirror. "Look, there are the royals, there’s the Coronation, here’s a golden coach and hereditary wealth." And we look and we’re told this is what makes Britain great. And some of us, shamefully, buy the lies.

Meanwhile, with our eyes averted, the political prestidigitation goes on and your pocket is picked, your county sucked dry and your children robbed of their future.

There’s no subtle answer to any of this. The entire edifice just needs torn down to the ground and rebuilt. A tweak here or policy adjustment there isn’t enough. We’re so far gone, the surgery must be radical. But it can be done: higher taxes for higher earners. Equitable corporation tax. Using those tax receipts for infrastructure: roads and homes, crucially affordable homes for the young. Renationalisation of public utilities, specifically energy. Free education so our children don’t enter adult life saddled with debt – just as people like me didn’t leave university with debt.

C’mon, you don’t need a rehearsal of what basic social democracy is, do you? You know, the stuff they do in all those northern European countries where people are happy and healthy, well-educated and can see a doctor before they die.

But if that’s not to your tastes, then wave a flag during the Coronation, tug your forelock for the bankers and corporate wolves who own you body and soul, and save your venom for refugees or whoever Rupert Murdoch tells you to hate tomorrow.