Over the past week, the media have been feeding us with a blow by blow account of the Duke of Cambridge's family holiday in New Zealand and Australia - all paid for out of our taxes. As if anyone really cared about the whereabouts of the country's only state welfare recipients for whom the benefit cap doesn't apply!
But what made this media circus even harder to swallow was the revelation, at the very same time, of the government's contemptuous dismissal of the real impact of its welfare cuts on the poorest.
When the Trussell Trust, Britain's largest foodbank organisation, revealed last week that it had distributed 900,000 food parcels in 2013-2014 - a 168% increase over the previous year - the Department of Welfare and Pensions' only answer was that the data was "misleading".
This response was immediately backed up - which, obviously, was no coincidence - by the Tory-supporting Daily Mail's "investigative" stunt designed to show that anyone could request a food parcel and get it. But even assuming that the Mail didn't lie - which it often has in the past - why would anyone choose to go through the rather humiliating experience of queueing up for a food parcel at a food bank, without being absolutely desperate?
Wealth, poverty and the crisis
Whatever ministers may claim, however, their own figures expose the brutality of their welfare cuts. Over the past three years, 1.7 million households have been affected by these cuts: 300,000 have had their housing benefit cut, 920,000 their council tax support cut, and 480,000 have had both cut. This, together with the fall in real wages, the under-employment and the casualisation resulting from the bosses' turning the screw on workers' pay and conditions in the crisis, is what feeds the explosion of poverty and food banks - nothing else.
Yes, in Britain's ultra-rich economy the greed of the capitalist class has now created a situation in which a sizeable section of the working class has become too poor to buy enough to eat - just as in any Third World country!
Meanwhile, over the same 3-year period, companies have been allowed to pay less and less tax on their profits. At the same time, they've been using an increasing part of these profits to pay dividends rather than to invest in socially useful production which would create real jobs. The crisis of their own system has been used as a weapon by the capitalists to increase even further their share of the wealth - produced by workers' labour - at the expense of the entire working class majority.
No wonder we are now at a point where the country's five richest families own as much wealth as the 12.6 million poorest! The wealth of the tiny minority of capitalists who control the economy can only increase thanks to the impoverishment of millions. Growing social inequalities and on-going crises are what capitalism and its profit system are really about.
Our future is in our own hands
All this makes the politicians' hypocritical attempts to claim the high moral ground in the name of "religious values" even more preposterous - and farcical.
Of course, Cameron's celebration of Britain as a "Christian nation", last week, was nothing but electioneering - everyone knows that. But it takes a huge degree of cynicism for Cameron to posture as a champion of "Christian values" - which, after all, are supposed to protect the weak and the vulnerable - when, at the same time, his policies are attacking the weak and the vulnerable so brutally!
Of course, politicians like Cameron and his colleagues right across the political spectrum may well be going to church, on occasion, for the benefit of the TV cameras and potential voters, but the only thing that really counts for them are the "values" of big business and the City. Their only real faith is in a god called "Profit".
The traditional anthem of the working class movement, the "Internationale", remains as valid as it has ever been, when it says:
"There are no supreme saviours
"Neither God, nor Caesar, nor tribune.
"Producers, let us save ourselves"
Yes, against the on-going crises of the profit system, against the greed of the capitalist class and against the hypocrisy and devious viciousness of the politicians, the working class can only rely on its own collective strength.
Today's growing social inequalities will only be reversed by getting rid of social inequality itself - i.e. by overthrowing the profit system, in order to pave the way for a social order designed to cater for the needs of all, rather than the greed of a few.