Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: We're not all in this together

It would be terribly intrusive but boy, wouldn't we like to know the pre-Christmas spending habits of the Camerons, Osbornes and the terrifically jovial, blond Johnson clan? Shop assistants are not whistleblowers, but we can assume the puddings and pies will not come from Aldi, ale will not replace champagne and there is little chance that members of these great houses will be seen at New Look. That's bitchy. Maybe, enthused by Kirstie Allsopp, loaded queen of crafts, the genteel Laydees have decided to gift down and are knitting bracelets for diamond charms. It's all relative, isn't it?

The Queen, for example, faces a pay freeze until 2015 – only £30m per annum. See how frugally she lives – storing food in Tupperware boxes, turning the lights off in all the thousand and one rooms she owns. And this is how we repay her. Must be why she is cheering herself up with a new filly for £500,000, paid for from her own incalculable private fortune.

OK, so they have it and flaunt it, as they have through history. The rich, like the poor, are always with us. But, until now, nobody pretended that thieving bankers with their bonuses and tax-avoiding businessmen and politicians from hideously privileged backgrounds suffer in bad times as much as the lone mum bringing up her kids on benefits, the disabled widower in care and the man in the cornershop open day and night making a hard living. But, they say we are "all in this together" and they are honourable men.

This slogan is a cover for policies that calculatedly seek to "sacrifice" a section of the population and to wreck the welfare state. Inequality is not only an unfortunate result of the economic crisis, it is the ideological tenet of the right, But, I repeat, they say, we are in this together, and they are honourable men.

Except we are not, and they are not. Research shows incontrovertibly that the impact of austerity is being borne by those who are least able to endure the effects. Cambridge academics Michael Kitson, Ron Martin and Peter Tyler are in no doubt that "the burden of fiscal retrenchment will fall on social protection. It will be the poor, the unemployed and sick who are feeling the pain. We are not all in it together".

Health inequalities between the richest and poorest are worse than they were in the 1920s, says the BMJ. It was not ever thus. In 2008 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development praised Britain for "the remarkable reduction in poverty" achieved in the previous eight years. The reversal has been fast and vicious. The result is disorder on the part of some who are lawless and others who are dislocated from society. The state in turn, including the judiciary, reacts with even more viciousness. Much more of that hides in the wings, breathing heavily, waiting for the next flare-up.

Last week I saw at London's Tricycle Theatre The Riots, a powerful dramatisation of testimonies collected by the writer Gillian Slovo. An after-show discussion followed, led by the feisty criminal defence solicitor Jude Lanchin, MP John McDonnell, one of our most principled politicians, and myself. Most people in the audience certainly didn't believe rioters were such criminals or the mendacious riff of shared pain. They were full of dread.

But not the rest of the country, it seems. A survey by the Office for National Statistics found Brits are irrepressibly jolly. I am not denying the reality of the recession and do believe the reform of pensions has to happen. But government-planned injustice and inequality are unacceptable, whatever the crisis. But why listen to me? I am just grumpy. Go to all those cheerfully going about their lives. Till the tears come. People will then realise we were never in this together.