Everything you need to know about this government is summed up in those food bags. The brazen “be thankful you’ve got anything at all” message; the disregard for dignity and even the most basic needs; the grubby wringing of profit from even the most basic responsibility.

They’re so ideologically opposed to anything that even looks like a public sector that they honestly believe the real good work of those food packages is that they provided a contract for a private company.

It’s the truth of trickle down economics. Even the very straightforward task of providing food to people who are hungry has to be squeezed and manipulated into a profit making exercise, and people are supposed to be happy with the crust that remains.

They are incapable of giving, providing, nurturing, and caring. Once you accept that, nothing else about them really matters. They’re a cruel, corrupt, fundamentally amoral institution.

But we can’t kid ourselves. They’re the cruel, corrupt, fundamentally amoral institution this country wanted. It’s simply that at the time of voting people imagined that cruelty would only be directed elsewhere, at an imagined other.

The forewarning was there all along: in the brutality of the hostile environment, the structural indifference of the benefits system, the slow dismantling of social care, the flat refusal to provide safe and secure housing for thousands of people.

The lesson from this should be: it’s no good imagining that cruelty can be conveniently contained or held at a comforting distance when in reality it’s the foundation that underpins our whole way of life.