The socio-economic experiment currently being conducted in Britain has caused huge suffering across the mass of the population.

Increasing numbers of people have been forced into low-paid insecure jobs and rising personal debt.

There are now 1.4 million people on zero-hours contracts, with two in five jobs created over recent years being classified as self-employed.

There are 4.6 million people classified as self-employed, some 15 per cent of the workforce.

Figures published by Parliament show that the average annual income for self-employment is £10,000 for women, lest anyone should think that self-employment equates to a growth of budding entrepreneurs.

Then there has been the growth in part-time workers, who now make up eight million out of the 30 million workforce. They account for half of the jobs created between 2010 and 2012.

At the same time real weekly wages overall have fallen by 8 per cent since 2008, equivalent to a fall in annual earnings of about £2,000 for a typical worker in Britain.

Working poverty has also been on the increase with an increasing amount of benefits going to those in work.

Just over half of the 13 million people in poverty — surviving on less than 60 per cent of the national median income — were from working families.

The result of this socio-economic experiment is that there is less money around to keep the wheels of the economy turning, hence the slowness of the growth rate.

Despite talking about cutting the deficit, the coalition government has actually borrowed more in five years than the previous Labour administration did in 13 years.

It is not cutting the deficit significantly because the tax take is down, due partly to the growth of low-paid insecure work.

Ongoing wage stagnation has driven people increasingly to the money lenders, with a seven-year high of £1.25 billion reported in November for borrowing on credit cards, loans and overdrafts. People don’t have the money, so they borrow and debt grows.

We have also seen increasing demonisation of the poor, who rely on benefits, as scroungers and skivers. This media mood music has allowed the government to cut away vast swathes of the welfare state support network.

The new charitable answer to poverty is foodbanks.

The church-backed Trussell Trust, which runs the nationwide network of foodbanks, reports 913,000 going to foodbanks over the past year — an increase of 129,000. There are now 423 foodbanks, compared with 54 when the coalition took power in 2010.

The trust points out that there have been 500,000 people coming to foodbanks in the six-month period between April and September last year, 38 per cent more than for the comparable period in 2013.

Currently, 45 per cent of foodbank referrals are due to benefit delays and changes, including sanctions, and 22 per cent of the 500,000 that came cited low income as the main trigger for the crisis.

This grotesque situation of low pay, growing indebtedness and a million people going to foodbanks is happening in one of the richest countries in the world — a country that has seen the number of resident billionaires grow from 53 to 100 over the past six years.

The richest 1,000 people now have £450bn of the wealth — an increase of £150bn in the past three years.

Surely it must be time to call a halt to this experiment and put the welfare of the human person back at the centre of the equation.

For more of Paul Donovan’s writing visit www.paulfdonovan.blogspot.com.