We pretend that “almost everyone has food and can scrape by, and anyone who can’t is just a shiftless waster, anyway” is good enough, and we pretend that the government and upper classes in wealthy countries aren’t constantly conspiring to wage a civil war of economics and access against people living lives of quiet desperation who are accused of being irrational and crazy and savage and uncivilized by their oppressors if they have the temerity to object to their oppression, and we pretend that a sustained campaign of marginalization and denial and subjugation doesn’t amount to a lifetime of abuse committed against vulnerable people by their own government. And we pretend that a government in service to an ideal that ostracizes many citizens by virtue of poverty and others by virtue of indifference to its ostensible rewards is a functional government and not simply a tool of privileged elites. Those pretenses are going up in smoke across the UK.