The recent flurry of Conservatives falling over themselves to outdo each other in the “game” of who can bash the lower classes the most has been won hands down by the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

And that’s even including Lady Jenkins’s impressive attempt: “Poor people do not know how to cook.”

George Osborne’s reaction to a recent BBC Radio interview is also indicative of the state we are in, and shines a light on what austerity really is about.

Osborne heralds from one of the oldest Anglo-Irish aristocracies and is the heir apparent to the Osborne baronetcy. He was educated at St Paul’s School, London, and Magdalen College, Oxford.

Given his background, for him to get so riled by the pathetically soft interview conducted by BBC correspondent Norman Smith last week was as startling as it was revealing. Smith put it to the Chancellor that the Conservatives’ spending cuts will — according to the Office for Budget Responsibility — reduce the state to its lowest size since the 1930s.

Mr Osborne replied: “I would have thought the BBC would have learnt from the last four years that its totally hyperbolic coverage of spending cuts has not been matched by what has actually happened … I had all that when I was interviewed four years ago and has the world fallen in? No it has not.”

The world had fallen in for Sarah (not her real name), who is now a volunteer at the Oldham foodbank in Clegg Street.

The charity makes bags of food up for service users and is open four days a week. On a busy day they receive up to 30 customers.

She said: “Many people visiting for the first time are nervous because of the perceived stigma about receiving hand-outs, and so reassuring them is very important.

“I can empathise. It took me three weeks to pluck up the courage to go to the foodbank when I visited a couple of years ago. I cried before my visit and cried after I got home.

“I’ve been surprised by the level of need in Oldham — especially by the number of people who use the foodbank and are in work — and that’s helped me look again at my own circumstances.”

This is the reality behind the shocking statistics issued by the Trussell Trust, the umbrella organisation that represents the nation’s foodbanks.

More than 500,000 people received three days’ food and support from the Trust’s food banks in the six months between April and September 2014 — 38 per cent more than during the same period last year.

It’s not just a foodbank issue. At the beginning of November this paper reported findings from KPMG that stated an eye-watering five million “working poor” are not “paid a living wage.”

Let us remember that this is also occurring alongside a surge in pay packets pocketed by the country’s leading CEOs.

Just last month BG Group offered a measly £25 million package to entice hard-up Helge Land to head the company, a sum which included a £12 million “golden hello.”

It was left to the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby to pose the question about hunger on many people’s lips: “How shocking is it to find this happening here?... Happening here it is in the wrong place. We don’t do that in this country and we need to stop it.”

The most telling comment was made by Prof Liz Dowler of Warwick University, who stressed there’s no reason for austerity and food poverty “to be linked up except in the minds of those who are too rich to have any notion of what it’s like trying to make ends meet on a low income.”

This gets to the nub of the issue. Austerity is simply a term bandied around to attempt to blind us to the fact that what is actually taking place — as stressed by David Harvey’s stunning account in Enigma of Capital — is a massive transfer of wealth from the working classes to the top 1 per cent of the world’s wealthiest.

Billionaire Warren Buffett neatly sums up the situation: “There’s class warfare all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

So while the world may not have fallen in for the heir apparent to the Osborne baronetcy, the same cannot be said for the country as a whole.

And the fact the Chancellor can think otherwise is profoundly troubling.

The question is, what are we going to do about it?